Origins

• The KGB was formed in 1954, taking up the duties of a series of state security agencies that grew out of the Russian Revolution, including the Cheka (1917 to 1922) and the NKGB (1941 to 1946). Its mission was twofold: to defend the Soviet government from its enemies at home and abroad.
  
  In terms of its domestic duties, the KGB maintained surveillance of the Soviet people using spy technology and secret informants. It interrogated, tried and jailed those it suspected of disloyal behavior. These included regular citizens as well as noted dissidents like writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov and writer Vladimir Bukovsky. All spent time in Soviet prisons and labor camps.
  
  Outside its domestic boundaries, the KGB worked to strengthen the international influence of the Soviet Union via espionage, counterespionage, covert operations and propaganda campaigns.
  
  In short, the KGB as a single Soviet agency was charged with performing the duties that the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency did for the United States.
  
  

The KGB and The U.S.

• Prior to and during World War II, Russian intelligence enjoyed some success in recruiting agents within the United States, including such famed accused traitors Alger Hiss, Elizabeth Bentley and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. By the time the KGB was born in the 1950s, however, McCarthyism and Communist witch-hunting made the United States a more difficult terrain. Even so, the KGB continued to sneak illegal agents into the country, such as Rudolph Herrmann, who was busted by the FBI and turned into a double agent in 1980. And it still found disenchanted U.S. citizens willing to turn over top secrets, like former CIA agent David Barnett, who was also arrested in 1980 for selling state secrets to Moscow.
  
  The KGB also worked to undermine U.S. prestige and policy abroad. For example, it funneled money to groups protesting the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in Western Europe during the 1980s, and tried to scuttle President Jimmy Carter's Middle East peace talks in the late 1970s by circulating phony U.S. State Department dispatches, including one detailing plans to overthrow Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
  
  The KGB also took advantage to build Soviet prestige and discredit the United States in its own backyard: Latin America. In his book "The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the Third World," author Christopher Andrew used the papers of KGB apparatchik and archivist Vasili Mitrokhin to detail how the KGB first stepped up its presence in the region by supporting the Castro revolution in Cuba, and then by aiding the candidacy and presidency of Chilean Socialist Salvador Allende in the early 1970s. The KGB also began developing ties with the Nicaraguan Marxist group the Sandinistas almost two decades before they took power in 1979, Andrew writes.
  
  Notable KGB efforts to discredit the United States in the region included fomenting the "baby parts" rumor, which alleged that rich Americans were buying Latin Amrican children, then killing them and using their organs for transplants.
  
  

Assassinations

• The KGB was also suspected of taking its international gripes so far as to commit political murder, such as when Bulgarian dissident Markov was fatally poisoned on Waterloo Bridge from a jab with a tainted umbrella tip. The alleged assassin was believed to be a KGB agent. The KGB was also widely suspected to be behind the assassination attempt of Pope John Paul II, who was shot on May 13, 1981 by a Turkish man named Mehmet Ali Agca in St. Peter's Square.
  
  

Leadership and Major Figures

• The KGB had eight chairmen during its history, the longest serving of whom was Yuri Andropov, who headed the organization from 1968 until 1982, when he was elevated to the post of general secretary of the Communist Party. Andropov was credited with modernizing the agency and improving its propaganda and disinformation campaigns. Russian Prime Minister and former President Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent from 1975 to 1991.
  
  

The End of The KGB

• In August 1991, KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov led a failed effort to overthrow President Mikhail Gorbachev. Two months later, the agency was dismantled, its duties distributed among several new entities including the FSB secret police agency and the SVR espionage agency SVR.