Read Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America Online
Authors: Harvey Klehr;John Earl Haynes;Alexander Vassiliev
The Soviet armed forces had a separate foreign military intelligence
agency that also went through several name changes. For similar reasons
of simplicity, Soviet military intelligence will be referred to as the GRU
-Chief Intelligence Directorate.
The principal sources cited in this book are handwritten transcriptions,
extracts, and summaries of documents from the archive of the Russian
Foreign Intelligence Service for the KGB and its predecessor agencies.
Alexander Vassiliev recorded the documents in eight notebooks, titled by
him as Black, White #i, White #2, White #3, Yellow #i, Yellow #2, Yellow
#3, and Yellow #4, as well as some additional loose pages called the Odd
Pages. All notebook pages are numbered. Within each notebook, documents are cited to numbered pages in a numbered archival file. The original handwritten notebooks, transcriptions into word-processed Russian,
and translations into English are available for research use at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., as well as
on the Web. The transcriptions and translations are paginated and formatted to match the original handwritten notebooks.
Sample citation. On pages 1-15 of White Notebook #1 Alexander Vassiliev transcribed large sections of a 30 September 1944 report from
Vasily Zarubin to Vsevolod Merkulov entitled "Memorandum (on the station's work in the country)" and cited it to pages 381-445 of volume 1 of
archival file 35112. (Most KGB archival records are bound into volumes.)
This report is cited as follows:
Zarubin to Merkulov, "Memorandum (on the station's work in the country),"
30 September 1944, KGB file 35112, v. 1, pp. 381-445, Alexander Vassiliev,
White Notebook #1 [2007 English Translation], trans. Steven Shabad (199396), 1-15.
Any subsequent citation to White Notebook #i in a chapter will be shortened to: "White #i."
KGB cables decrypted by the National Security Agency's Venona project are cited by the message number, sending and receiving stations,
and date. Sample: "Venona 6z8 KGB New York to Moscow, 5 May 1944."
The Venona decryptions are available at the National Cryptologic Museum, Ft. Meade, MD, and on the Web.
Alexander Vassiliev in his notebooks usually recorded cover names inside
double quotation marks, but he also often used single quotation marks or
none at all. The double quotation mark convention is used in this volume
in text written by the authors. However, in the case of text quoted from
the notebooks where double quote marks were omitted or single quote
marks used, the quoted material is left unchanged. When material is
quoted from the notebooks, when a cover name is quoted, the real name
behind the cover name will be given in brackets upon the first occurrence in a quoted passage but not for subsequent occurrences of the
cover name in the same passage. All bracketed material in a quotation
from Vassiliev's notebooks is an editorial insertion. On the few occasions
where passages quoted from the notebooks contained brackets, the
brackets have been changed to parentheses.