Portal:Espionage

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The Espionage Portal

Espionage is the practice of obtaining information about an organization or a society that is considered secret or confidential (spying) without the permission of the holder of the information. What differentiates espionage from other forms of intelligence work is that espionage involves obtaining the information by accessing the place where the information is stored or accessing the people who know the information and will divulge it through some kind of subterfuge.

Espionage is usually thought of as part of an institutional effort (i.e., governmental or corporate espionage). The term espionage is most readily associated with state spying on potential or actual enemies, primarily for military purposes, but this has been extended to spying involving corporations, known specifically as industrial espionage. Many nations routinely spy on both their enemies and allies, although they maintain a policy of not making comment on this. Black's Law Dictionary (1990) defines espionage as: "...gathering, transmitting, or losing...information related to the national defense."

A spy is an agent employed to obtain such secrets. The term intelligence officer is also used to describe a member of the armed forces, police officer or civilian intelligence agency who specialises in the gathering, fusion and analysis of information and intelligence in order to provide advice to their government or another organisation. Spymaster is a term often used in literature for the superior of a spy ring.

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KGB (transliteration of "КГБ") is the Russian-language abbreviation for Committee for State Security, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti).The KGB was the umbrella organization name for the Soviet Union's premier security agency, secret police, and intelligence agency, from 1954 to 1991.

The term KGB is also used in a more general sense to refer to the successive Soviet State Security organizations before 1954 (from the Cheka in 1917). The term KGB is also sometimes used in the Western press to refer to the Russian Federation's Federal Security Service (FSB) since 1991.

Roughly, the KGB's operational domain encompassed functions and powers like those exercised by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the counter-intelligence (internal security) division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Security Agency, the Federal Protective Service, and the Secret Service in the United States, or by the twin organizations MI5 and Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in the United Kingdom.

On 21 December 1995, the President of Russia Boris Yeltsin signed the decree that disbanded the KGB in Russia, to be substituted by the FSB. The official Russian name of the State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus is still KGB.

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The Petrov Affair was a Cold War spy drama in Australia in April 1954, involving the defection of Vladimir Petrov, third secretary in the Soviet embassy in Canberra. Petrov's wife, Evdokia Petrova, a Russian spy, came to the centre of the affair when she was seized by Australian Security Intelligence Organisation agents from MVD agents who were escorting her from the country. Images of Petrova as she was taken by ASIO agents and made her decision to defect became iconic in Australia in the 1950s.

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Julius Rosenberg (May 12, 1918 – June 19, 1953) and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (September 28, 1915 – June 19, 1953) were American citizens and Communist Party members who were thrust into the world spotlight when they were tried, convicted and executed for spying for the Soviet Union. Specifically, the couple was charged with conspiracy to commit espionage and were accused of passing nuclear weapons secrets to Russian agents. The accuracy of these charges remains controversial. Decades later, however, Soviet communications decrypted by the VENONA project became publicly available which indicated that Julius Rosenberg was actively involved in espionage. They provided no specific evidence that he performed the specific acts of espionage for which he was convicted, or that Ethel Rosenberg was involved.

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Categories

Espionage

• Intelligence agencies
• Terminology
• Spies
• Spy fiction
• Surveillance

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