Great, I can't find my copy of the Mitrokhin Archive. Guh.

But yeah, the KGB was successful in some areas and terrible in others. For example, they were pretty good at recruiting college kids (Like the Cambridge spy ring) who would then work in high level government positions, and they had success at stealing science and technology information from the US. (I'm willing to bet that's why the Tu-195 Blackjack looks like the B1 Lancer, along with a few air superiority fighters.) But one of the big problems they had as an organization was that their most successful agents were recruited from the countries they spied on, which, as far as KGB command was concerned (called "The Center") made them all inherently suspect and possibly double agents. There were at least a couple guys who kept fervently begging to help the KGB and would actually send a whole shitload of valuable stuff their way, but Center would ignore it because they assumed it was a counterintelligence wonk from the CIA.

When they tried to produce homegrown agents, their first attempts were hilariously bad, as their spies would stick out in the crowd really easily. Young men born and bred and indoctrinated in the USSR would spend their first weeks wandering around London and New York and so on just trying to wipe the culture shock off their faces and not look like bumbling idiots.

I'm still only halfway through but some of this stuff is pretty funny. Guy Burgess apparently drunkenly bragged about helping the KGB and people still didn't really suspect anything.

There's a lot of wrong information in this thread. First, the KGB was not superior to western spies during the cold war. Both had some great success and failures. The KGB's biggest examples would be stuff like Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, or the Cambridge Spy Ring. The US and UK also had many notable successes. Unfortunately I am at work right now and can't remember specific names or spellings (I am horrible with Russian names). The KGB never succeeded in penetrating any US intelligence agency but they did have success recruiting persons already in US intelligence. The same is true of the US in regards to Soviet intelligence. There was a lot of paranoia by both sides when it came to trying to recruit spies from within the respective enemy. Aldrich Ames was originally turned away by the Soviets be cause they thought he was a trap.

Here are some great books on the subject:

[The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB] (http://www.amazon.com/Main-Enemy-Inside-Story-Showdown-ebook/dp/B000QCS8Y2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394466382&sr=1-1&keywords=the+main+enemy) is a book by Milt Bearden, a former CIA case officer and one time head of the Soviet desk at the CIA. It covers the CIA and KGB shadow war during the 80s and 90s and is told from Bearden's perspective as a mid level and high ranking CIA officer during that time period. This book also covers the CIA activity in Afghanistan from 1985-89 when Bearden was in charge of CIA operations there.

[Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer: The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames] (http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Handler-Officer-Recruited-Hanssen-ebook/dp/B0095XKFZ8/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394466382&sr=1-12&keywords=the+main+enemy) by Victor Cherkashin is exactly what the tile says. It is a book told from a KGB officer's perspective about the recruting and running of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. I highly recommend reading this book after reading the book by Bearden. They compliment each other well and together provide a pretty comprehensive overview of the spy war part of the Cold War.

For a more historical look at spies and intelligence operations during the entire 20th century, including the cold war I recommend reading A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century by Jeffrey Richelson. This book covers all major intelligence programs and operations from all disciplines not just HUMINT*, though.

*HUMINT is the abbreviation for Human Intelligence which includes spy craft and is one of the largest disciplines in intelligence. The other disciplines are Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), Imagery Intelligence (IMINT), Measures and Signal Intelligence (MASINT), Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), and Counter Intelligence (CI).

EDIT-Fixed link formatting

I am far from convinced the KGB was superior to western intelligence agencies but I can point out a few areas where they were.

Some of the KGB's active measures are still affecting public opinion today or are, in any case, still part of popular culture. There are two important conspiracy theories that were directly created by the KGB and still have sway today and can be said to have been more than effective; Operation INFEKTION was the KGBs attempt to discredit the U.S. and foster anti americanism by saying that HIV/AIDS were a U.S. military experiment, this was uncovered after the fall of the U.S.S.R. by Ex-Soviet Premier Yevgeni Primakov. The second is the most pervasive, the JFK assassination conspiracy theories. One of the very early conspiracy theory books about the assassination, published before the Warren report, was by Joachim Joesten. We only found out after the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the publication of the smuggled Mithrokin archive that the author was a paid KGB agent and that the publisher was a KGB front. In spite of all of that, the book is still parroted to this day and used as a source by conspiracy theorists. The author says this isn't true but the Archives have proven pretty good as a source since their release.

The KGB was a little bit more skilled with assassinations than the CIA, which has several well known gaffes on its list, while the KGB has several well known successes on its list, such as the assassination of Georgi Markov (also known as the case of "The Bulgarian umbrella"). In general, both the KGB and CIA left few traces when they conducted one of these measures, but cases that are attributed to the KGB are often far more ambiguous as to who the assassin is, even if the KGB is the prime suspect. In any case, we may have a skewed vision of one or the other of the agencies if they are truly good at what they do. Sources are often dubious or have a clear axe to grind, leading to a lot of speculation on the matters of intelligence during the Cold War. The best, in my opinion, is the Mitrokhin archive, but even it only offers a one sided view.

They weren't better. They had the advantage of operating inside of the west's free society. Where travel was generally unrestricted and surveillance was light, making it easier to avoid detection.

Also to add onto the question if it's not beyond the scope, how did those spy agencies turn into what we know today as the KGB and NSA, especially with the NSA in modern times probably outspending the KGB by a lot?

One thing nobody has really mentioned was why Russia was so successful at HUMINT, and why they were superior to the US. After 1917, the Soviets pretty much got rid of anyone who would have opposed them from the inside. They started with Operation TRUST to identify and weed out any opposers, and did away with them. After that it was the Purges. KGB heads and high ups were constantly being executed and replaced and it was difficult for Western spy agencies to have contacts as chances are they would have died. The original handlers for the Cambridge Five were purged.

Getting in to the USSR was also difficult (see Frank Wisner who tried to run a ring in Eastern Europe but was totally hoodwinked by the strong grip the Soviets had on Hungary and Romania and all of the assets he thought he had were actually KGB assets feeding him disinformation (Volkman, E., Espionage, The Greatest Spy Operations of the Twentieth Century, 1995, pp. 193-205).

The US was far more humanitarian when it came to treatment of spies (as a whole, there were obviously the odd issues such as the Rosenbergs and Yuri Nosenko), but they weren't known for murdering mass numbers of their own people as Russia was doing with the Purge.

The reason I am asking is because I saw a documentary about how soviet spies would seduce women in de west. At some point you couldnt trust your own wife anymore. There were literally wifes ratting out their husbands.

And I also read that they didnt know what life was like in the east. So they paradropped some guy in siberia, but because western intelligence was so compromised, there were russians waiting for him at the drop off point. There was suposed to be a period at the start of the cold war, they really had no idea what life was really like behind the wall.

There are some really cool spy stories floating around, so that is why I would love to get some info on this.

They only really started to win the intelligence war with spy satellites. That is when the Russian bluff, so to speak, was really called. And we figured out the russians werent much of a threat.

Is there a subreddit dedicated to espionage topics not called r/conspiracy??

side question. I was treading another thread talking about Mccarthy. How Hoover informed him of soviet activity, but mostly how the spies were known and not likely to accomplish anything. Other people in this thread have mentioned some effective soviet agents. should Hoover have been more concerned with the spies he was aware of? if not what differentiated the incompetent spies from the competent?