Benjamin B. Fischer | |
---|---|
Born | September 1946 (age 77) |
Known for | CIA chief historian |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Columbia University, Cornell University |
Academic work | |
Discipline | History |
Sub-discipline | Eastern European and Soviet Union affairs;intelligence |
Institutions | CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence |
Benjamin B. Fischer (born September 1946 [1] ) is an American historian specializing in eastern European and Soviet history. He was chief historian for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),working as an officer at the agency for 34 years prior to his retirement. [2]
Fischer is a graduate of Cornell University and Columbia University. During his CIA career,he worked for nine years in the agency’s Directorate of Intelligence as an analyst of Soviet issues,for 15 years in the Directorate of Operations in the United States and abroad,and for 10 years on the history staff of the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence,culminating as chief historian. [3]
The White House Millennium Council selected his monograph At Cold War's End:US Intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,1989–1991 (1999) for inclusion in a time capsule at the National Archives to be opened in 2100. [4] In 2002,Fischer was a visiting research fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. [5] He was interviewed in the 2021 Netflix series Spycraft . [6]
Khadamat-e Aetla'at-e Dawlati,also known by the acronym KhAD,was the agency in charge of internal security,foreign intelligence,counter-intelligence and the secret police of the former Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is an intelligence agency and combat support agency of the United States Department of Defense,specializing in defense and military intelligence.
Robert Philip Hanssen was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history".
Aldrich Hazen Ames is an American former CIA counterintelligence officer who was convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union and Russia in 1994. He is serving a life sentence,without the possibility of parole,in the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute,Indiana. Ames was known to have compromised more highly classified CIA assets than any other officer until Robert Hanssen,who was arrested seven years later in 2001.
James Jesus Angleton was an American intelligence operative who served as chief of the counterintelligence department of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1954 to 1975. According to Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms,Angleton was "recognized as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world".
The First Main Directorateof the Committee for State Security under the USSR council of ministers was the organization responsible for foreign operations and intelligence activities by providing for the training and management of covert agents,intelligence collection administration,and the acquisition of foreign and domestic political,scientific and technical intelligence for the Soviet Union.
Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky,codenamed Hero and Yoga was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) colonel during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets,including the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. It also gave US President John F. Kennedy,during the Cuban Missile Crisis that followed,valuable information about Soviet weakness that allowed him to face down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and resolve the crisis without a nuclear war.
Karl František Koecher is a Czech mole known to have penetrated the CIA during the Cold War.
Oleg Danilovich Kalugin is a former KGB general. He was during a time,head of KGB political operations in the United States and later a critic of the agency. After being convicted of spying for the West in absentia during a trial in Moscow,he remained in the US and was sworn in as a citizen on 4 August 2003.
The Office of Technical Service is a component of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency,responsible for supporting CIA's clandestine operations with gadgets,disguises,forgeries,secret writings,and weapons. The OTS traces its history to October 1942,when OSS director William J. Donovan created the OSS Research and Development Branch,a technical group tasked with creating "dirty tricks and deadly weapons" to combat the US's World War II enemies. Donovan named Cornell University-trained chemist and executive Stanley Platt Lovell as the branch's first head,a man whom the CIA remembers as the "founding father" of the OTS. In the 1950s and early 1960s it also researched,investigated,and experimented with the use of drugs,chemicals,hypnosis,and isolation to extract information during interrogation,as well as to make it easier for American captives to resist interrogation. OTS is part of CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology.
Able Archer 83 was a military exercise conducted by NATO that took place in November 1983. It simulated a period of heightened nuclear tensions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact,leading to concerns that it could have been mistaken for a real attack by the Soviet Union. The exercise is considered by some to be one of the closest moments the world came to nuclear war during the Cold War. It was the annual Able Archer exercise conducted in November 1983. The purpose of the exercise,like previous years,was to simulate a period of conflict escalation,culminating in the U.S. military attaining a simulated DEFCON 1 coordinated nuclear attack. The five-day exercise,which involved NATO commands throughout Western Europe,was coordinated from the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) headquarters in Casteau,Belgium.
Adolf Georgiyevich Tolkachev was a Soviet electronics engineer. He provided vital documents to the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) between 1979 and 1985. Working at the Soviet radar design bureau Phazotron as one of the chief designers,Adolf Tolkachev gave the CIA complete detailed information about projects such as the R-23,R-24,R-33,R-27,and R-60,S-300 missile systems;fighter-interceptor aircraft radars used on the MiG-29,MiG-31,and Su-27;and other avionics. KGB Police executed him in Moscow for being a spy in 1986.
The Directorate of Operations (DO),less formally called the Clandestine Service,is a component of the US Central Intelligence Agency. It was known as the Directorate of Plans from 1951 to 1973;as the Directorate of Operations from 1973 to 2005;and as the National Clandestine Service (NCS) from 2005 to 2015.
William Joseph Burns is an American diplomat and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Biden administration since March 19,2021. He previously served as U.S. deputy secretary of state from 2011 to 2014;in 2009 he served as acting secretary of state for a day,prior to the confirmation of Hillary Clinton. Burns retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2014 after a 32-year career. From 2014 to 2021,he served as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),known informally as the Agency,metonymously as Langley and historically as the Company,is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with gathering,processing,and analyzing national security information from around the world,primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT) and conducting covert action through its Directorate of Operations. The agency is headquartered in the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley,Virginia.
Dmitri Fyodorovich Polyakov was a Major General in the Soviet GRU during the Cold War. According to former high-level KGB officer Sergey Kondrashev,Polyakov acted as a KGB disinformation agent at the FBI's New York City field office when he was posted at United Nations headquarters in 1962. Kondrashev's post-Cold War friend,former high-level CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley,says Polyakov "flipped" and started spying for the CIA when he was reposted to Rangoon,Moscow,and New Delhi. Polyakov was suddenly recalled to Moscow in 1980,arrested,tried,and finally executed in 1988.
The Committee for State Security was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 13 March 1954 until 3 December 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka,GPU,OGPU,NKGB,NKVD and MGB,it was attached to the Council of Ministers. It was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction",carrying out internal security,foreign intelligence,counter-intelligence and secret police functions. Similar agencies operated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from the Russian SFSR,where the KGB was headquartered,with many associated ministries,state committees and state commissions.
The Interagency Active Measures Working Group was a group led by the United States Department of State and later by the United States Information Agency (USIA). The group was formed early during the Reagan administration,in 1981,purportedly as an effort to counter Soviet disinformation.
In 1995 it was revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had delivered intelligence reports to the U.S. government between 1986 and 1994 which were based on agent reporting from confirmed or suspected Soviet operatives. From 1985 to his arrest in February 1994,CIA officer and KGB mole Aldrich Ames compromised Agency sources and operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,leading to the arrest of many CIA agents and the execution of at least ten of them. This allowed the KGB to replace the CIA agents with its own operatives or to force them to cooperate,and the double agents then funneled a mixture of disinformation and true material to U.S. intelligence. Although the CIA's Soviet-East European (SE) and Central Eurasian divisions knew or suspected the sources to be Soviet double agents,they nevertheless disseminated this "feed" material within the government. Some of these intelligence reports even reached Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush,as well as President-elect Bill Clinton.
Amaryllis Fox Kennedy is an American writer,television host,public speaker,former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer,and campaign manager for her father-in-law Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 2024 presidential campaign. She left the CIA in 2010. Kennedy wrote a memoir about her time in the CIA,Life Undercover:Coming of Age in the CIA, published by Knopf Doubleday in 2019. She is the host of the six-episode Netflix documentary series The Business of Drugs,released in 2020.