2019-10-04 21:27:49

Michael Weiss

"This project, presented by The Interpreter , will explore the history of Soviet espionage and subversion, as told through never-before-published KGB training manuals spanning multiple decades. Once used to train Soviet intelligence officers, these documents are still classified in modern Russia because of their continued curricular use in teaching tradecraft to Vladimir Putin's spies at Russia’s domestic and foreign intelligence academies. They range in content from how to recruit and psychologically manipulate agents on Western soil; how to root out enemy disinformation schemes; how to infiltrate international scientific gatherings to recruit agents; to how to outflank suspected agents provocateurs. These are all methods still used today to undermine the United States and European countries.

Each publication will be:

- Posted in full in scanned form at The Interpreter;

- Posted in full English translation next to the Russian-language original;

- “Curated” by Interpreter staff

Curation will include a stand-alone essay for each manual explaining the tradecraft it reveals and how it relates to actual historical episodes and contemporary Russian intelligence efforts. (To see examples of how this looks, see Interpreter Editor-in-Chief Michael Weiss’s series on four previously uncovered KGB training manuals in The Dai...) These new manuals will be accompanied by a dynamic "spy exhibition," hosted at The Interpreter's website, which will feature:

- Audio interviews with former intelligence and counterintelligence officers on both sides of the Iron Curtain and international historians who can expound on what the case studies and theory teach us about KGB espionage;

- Short video documentaries revisiting a Cold War spy drama relevant to the manual in question." Quotes from the Interpreter website:

http://www.interpretermag.com/new-kgb-manuals/