Filip Kovacevic, "Secrets of KGB Counterintelligence in the mid-1950s: An Inside Look Based on New Archival Research"

More than thirty years have passed since the fall of the Soviet Union and the formal dissolution of the KGB, but the functioning of the KGB counterintelligence branch known as the Second Chief Directorate (SCD) remains little known. In a recently published book The Fourth Man: The Hunt for a KGB Spy at the Top of the CIA and the Rise of Putin’s Russia (2022), CIA veteran Robert Baer wrote that the SCD “represented the CIA’s most tenacious and opaque opponent.”  My presentation is based on the translation and analysis project I have completed for the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC which will soon be published on their website www.digitalarchive.org and on their popular Cold War history blog Sources & Methods. I will discuss a transcript of the July 30, 1955 meeting of the leadership of the SCD that I obtained from the collections of the Lithuanian Special Archives in Vilnius (also known as the Lithuanian KGB archive). The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to discuss the progress report of the regional counterintelligence branch in Soviet Latvia. However, the meeting went beyond the Latvian case and focused on the discussion of the overall deficiencies of Soviet counterintelligence and the ways to deal with them. All leadership figures of the SCD took part in a remarkably open and frank discussion and their statements are recorded in the transcript. The detailed analysis of the transcript allows us to play the role of a metaphorical fly on the wall regarding the issues that kept Soviet counterintelligence awake at night in the first decade of the Cold War and get an inside view of their self-assessments of how well (or how badly) they were doing their job.

Prof. Filip Kovacevic (PhD, University of Missouri, 2002) has more than 20 years of professional experience in university teaching. Since August 2015, he has taught in the Departments of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco as an adjunct professor and the Russia and Eastern Europe area specialist and was also the first to design and teach a course on intelligence and global security. From 2003 to 2014, Prof. Kovacevic lectured and taught across Europe, the Balkans, and the former USSR, including two years at the Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in St. Petersburg, Russia, and nine years at the University of Montenegro in Podgorica. He has received fellowships from the Open Society Institute and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Prof. Kovacevic is a board member of the International Association for Intelligence Education (IAFIE) and a development director for the North American Society for Intelligence History (NASIH).  Prof. Kovacevic has contributed chapters to The Routledge International Handbook of Universities, Security, and Intelligence Studies (2019) and Intelligence Communities and Cultures in Asia and the Middle East (2020) and published articles in dozen academic journals, including Intelligence and National Security, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Eastern European Politics and Societies, Mediterranean Quarterly, Political and Military Sociology: An Annual Review, Debatte: Journal of Central and Eastern Europe, and Journal of Cold War Studies (forthcoming). He is the author of a theoretical monograph on political psychology Liberating Oedipus? Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory (Lexington Books, 2007) and several books in Montenegrin language.  Prof. Kovacevic specializes in Soviet/Russian and Eastern European intelligence and counterintelligence history and spy fiction and is involved in the analytic study and translation of documents from the KGB archives. He is a frequent contributor to the Wilson Center's Cold War International History Program. In July 2022, he signed a contract with the University of Toronto Press Press for KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union.

Follow Filip on Twitter: @ChekistMonitor

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