#3 - JRL 7023
New volume of post-war intelligence work essays
released
MOSCOW, January 15 (Itar-Tass) -- The fifth volume of "Essays of Russian Foreign Intelligence History" devoted to special services' activities during the Cold War up until the mid-1960s has been released.
The intelligence service was reorganised several times after the Second World War. On May 30, 1947, the Soviet government decided to create the Information Committee under the Council of Ministers and task it with conducting political, military, scientific and technical intelligence. As a result, the intelligence services of the defence and security ministries were merged into one.
In the subsequent years the Committee was headed by Andrei Vyshinsky, who had succeeded Vyacheslav Motolov as foreign minister, and his deputy Valerian Zorin.
In January 1949, military intelligence was separated from the Committee, and two years later foreign intelligence and foreign counterintelligence were merged into one service within the State Security Ministry.
The Information Committee ceased to exist after the creation of the First Main Directorate of the State Security Ministry that was run by Colonel-General Alexander Sakharovsky longer than any of his successors (from 1956 to 1971).
The books tells of the work of Soviet intelligence in North Korea and Israel, of the nuclear campaign during which Soviet intelligence obtained the secret of the A-bomb.
"All events in the book are real, except for the dialogues between its characters, which were written on the basis of documents", Foreign Intelligence Service spokesman Boris Labusov said.
He said the volume had been prepared by intelligence service veterans and it had taken them almost three years to finish the work. "The closer they got to the present day, the more difficult it was to declassify the documents", he added.
Declassified documents make up one-third of the volume. "Some of them were published with certain things deleted and they will never be disclosed", Labusov said.
The authors are now working on the last, sixth, volume of the series. They plan to finish it a year and a half.
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