KGB BADGE SWORD SHIELD COMMUNIST SOVIET RUSSIA PIN USSR

$ 14.95

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KGB BADGE SWORD SHIELD COMMUNIST SOVIET RUSSIA PIN USSR

KGB BADGE SWORD SHIELD COMMUNIST SOVIET RUSSIA PIN USSR Shipping Info Description20148 UNIQUE RARE ITEM! SECURE AND SPEEDY DELIVERY FROM LAS VEGAS, NEVADA- THE SILVER STATE! GREAT ITEM! HONEST PRICE! SUPERB QUALITY! Only positive feedback comments from our buyers, regarding this item. Here are just a few of the best: “Great item! I highly recommend this eBay seller.” Buyer: nh-poet ( 845 ) Mar-17-10 “Very nice, even better than the picture!” Buyer: hymas01 ( 66 ) Mar-17-10 “Excellent Quality And Service. Highly Recommended.Buyer: dh0709 ( 981 ) Mar-04-10 “Great Product, Great Price, Fast Shipping, Great Ebayer!!!!!!” Buyer: albert8909 ( 82 ) Mar-05-10 “Beautiful items, Husband loves them!! A+” Buyer: wapmom51 ( 31 ) Feb-18-10 ” Pin ! KGB ! Ebay!” Buyer: 71gto ( 259 ) Jan-04-10 “A superior eBay seller. I will do repeat business.” Buyer: g1ha ( 403 ) “Best seller. Fantastic information about product. Service A+ Very Happy!” Buyer: stupol80 ( 29 ) Jan-14-10 WELL-MADE RARE ARTICLE! SOVIET (NOW DEFUNCT) OBSOLETE INSIGNIA. GREAT COLLECTIBLE- LEGENDARY SWORD & SHIELD KGB BADGE COMMEMORATIVE PIN. HONORARY MEMBER OF THE KGB – COMMITTEE FOR STATE SECURITY [KOMITET GOSYDARSTVENNOI BEZOPASNOSTI in Russian] Emblem Coat of Arms shield mini-badge insignia. RED STAR with Communist Hammer & Sickle Seal. Words in Russian: “KGB of the USSR. HONORARY MEMBER”. Very good size. Its measured 50 mm by 30 mm (2″ x 1-1/4″ inches) with very robust strong metal quality thickness! Hand-enameled deep colors, well-made heavy GOLD PLATED brass metal pin. Three-dimensional beautiful embossed item. Robust solid brass screw grip standard back side attachment. BRAND NEW MINT CONDITION! HANDSOME UNIQUE COLLECTIBLE & PERFECT SOLID GIFT for COLD WAR WARRIOR & SOVIET KGB MEMORABILIA AFICIONADOS! MUCH BETTER THAN PICTURES IN PERSON! SECURE & SPEEDY USA SHIPPING WITH DELIVERY CONFIRMATION SERVICE! K.G.B. Agency overview: Formed 1954 Preceding Agency Ministry for State Security Dissolved 1991 Superseding agency Federal Security Service Jurisdiction Council of Ministers of the USSR Headquarters Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union KGB (transliteration of “”) is the Russian abbreviation of Committee for State Security (Russian: ; Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosty), which was the official name of the umbrella organization serving as the Soviet Union’s premier security agency, secret police, and intelligence agency, from 1954 to 1991. The name of the largest of the Russian successors to the KGB is the FSB (, ; Federalnaya Slujba Bezopasnosty; English: Federal Security Service). The KGB’s function was illustrated by its official emblem: bearing both shield and sword, the KGB was an organization with a military hierarchy aimed at providing national defense, specifically the defence of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). It was similar in function to the United States’ CIA, with additional tasks of counter-espionage and national defense of the FBI, or by the twin organizations MI5 and MI6 in the United Kingdom. On December 21, 1995, the President of Russia Boris Yeltsin signed the decree that disbanded the KGB, which was then substituted by the FSB, the current domestic state security agency of the Russian Federation. In Belarus, a former Soviet republic, the official Russian name of the State Security Agency remains “KGB”. The term is also sometimes used figuratively in the Western press to refer to the current FSB committee after the 1991 renaming due to its recognition and public perception. Most of the information about the KGB remains secret. Origin of the KGB The first of the forerunners of the KGB, the Cheka, was established on December 19, 1917. It replaced the Tsarist Okhrana. The Cheka underwent several name and organizational changes over the years, becoming in succession the State Political Directorate (OGPU) (1923), People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) (1941), and Ministry for State Security (MGB) (1946), among others. In March 1953, Lavrentiy Beria consolidated the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the MGB into one body—the MVD; within a year, Beria was executed and MVD was split. The reformed MVD retained its police and law enforcement powers, while the second, new agency, the KGB, assumed internal and external security and intelligence functions, and was subordinate to the Council of Ministers. On July 5, 1978 the KGB was re-christened as the “KGB of the Soviet Union,” with its chairman holding a ministerial council seat. The KGB was dissolved when its chief, Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkov, used the KGB’s resources to aid the August 1991 coup attempt to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. On August 23, 1991 Colonel-General Kryuchkov was arrested, and General Vadim Bakatin was appointed KGB Chairman—and mandated to dissolve the KGB of the Soviet Union. On November 6, 1991, the KGB officially ceased to exist. Its services were divided into two separate organizations; the FSB for Internal Security and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) for Foreign Intelligence Gathering. The Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB) is functionally much like the Soviet KGB. Vladimir Kryuchkov died in 2007 from an unspecified illness in Moscow From its inception, the KGB was envisioned as the “sword and shield” of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The KGB achieved a remarkable string of successes in the early stages of its history. The then-comparatively lax security of foreign powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom allowed the KGB unprecedented opportunities to penetrate the foreign intelligence agencies and governments with its own ideologically-motivated agents such as the Cambridge Five. Arguably, the Soviet Union’s most important intelligence coup, the Cambridge Five, detailed information concerning the building of the atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project), which occurred due to well-placed KGB agents within that project such as Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall. The KGB also pursued enemies of the Soviet Union and of Joseph Stalin. These include people such as Leon Trotsky and groups like the counter-revolutionary White Guards, eventually achieving Trotsky’s assassination. During the Cold War, the KGB played a critical role in the survival of the Soviet one-party state through its suppression of political dissent (termed “ideological subversion”) and hounding of notable public figures such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. It also achieved notable successes in the foreign intelligence arena, including continued gathering of Western science and technology (including much of the technical information regarding the Concorde, which the USSR copied for the Tupolev Tu-144) from agents like Melita Norwood and the infiltration of West Germany’s government under Willy Brandt, alongside the East German Stasi. However, the double blow of the compromise of existing KGB operations through high-profile defections like those of Elizabeth Bentley in the United States and Oleg Gordievsky in Britain, as well as the drying up of ideological recruitment after the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, resulted in a major decline in the extent of the KGB’s capabilities. However, the KGB was assisted by some mercenary Western defectors such as the CIA mole Aldrich Ames and the FBI mole Robert Hanssen, helping to partly counteract its own hemorrhage of skilled agents. Modus operandi Most experts agree that the KGB then was the world’s most effective intelligence agency. Like most such agencies, the KGB operated legal and illegal residencies in its target countries. The legal residencies operated from the Soviet embassy via diplomatic immunity, thus, if caught or discovered spying, legal residents were free from prosecution. At best, the legal resident’s intelligence gathering would be compromised; either the KGB recalled the legal resident to home or the host country would expel him or her. Whereas, illegal residents spied without diplomatic immunity from prosecution (like the CIA’s non-official cover). Especially in its early years, the KGB often valued illegal residencies more than legal residencies, primarily because the illegals operate undercover more readily to infiltrate the targets. Using the ideological attraction of the first worker-peasant state, and later fighting fascism and the Great Patriotic War, the Soviets successfully recruited high-level spies, however, the 1939 signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the defeat of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and the 1968 Prague Spring mostly exhausted ideological recruitment; young radicals were repelled by the Red Army’s violations of sovereignty and the geriatric Brezhnev’s leadership. Instead, the KGB turned to blackmail and bribery to recruit Western agents. At legal residencies, operations were divided into four major sectors: political, economic, military strategic intelligence, and disinformation, called active measures in espionage parlance (PR Line), counter-intelligence and security (KR Line), and scientific and technological intelligence (X Line), which took on increasing importance throughout the Cold War. Other major operations included the collection of SIGINT (RP Line), illegal support (N Line), and a section dealing with émigrés (EM Line). Illegal residencies tended to be more decentralized and lacked official organizational structures. The KGB, like its Western counterparts, divided its intelligence personnel into agents, who provided the information, and controllers, who relayed the information to the Kremlin and were responsible for keeping track of and paying the agents. Some of the most important agents, like the Cambridge Five, had multiple controllers over their espionage careers. Ironically, Kim Philby, who had thought of himself as a KGB officer, was rudely informed of this distinction when he defected to the Soviet Union; as a foreign agent, he was not even allowed to enter KGB headquarters. To give cover for its illegals who were often born in Russia, the KGB constructed elaborate legends for them, involving them assuming the identity of a “live double,” who handed over his or her identity to assist in the fabrication, or a “dead double,” whose identity was based on a real (though deceased) person but was heavily altered by the KGB itself. These legends were usually supplemented by the agent living out the role given to him by the KGB in a foreign country before arriving at his final destination; one of the KGB’s favorite tactics was to send agents bound for the United States through its Ottawa residency in Canada. KGB agents practiced standard espionage craft such as the retrieval and photographing of classified documents using concealed cameras and microfilm, code-names in communication to disguise agents, contacts, targets, and the use of dead letter boxes to relay intelligence. In addition, the KGB made skillful use of agents provocateur, who infiltrated a target’s entourage by posing as sympathizers to the target’s cause or group. These agents provocateur were then used to sow dissent, influence policy, or help arrange kidnapping or assassination operations. Shipping Info INVENTORY ITEM 20148 DC ViB SHIPPING (POSTAGE) + HANDLING (PACKAGING) = S&H TOTAL: U.S.A. $2.99 CANADA $3.49 WORLDWIDE $3.99 PayPal—eBay’s service to make fast, easy, and secure payments for your eBay purchases! We accept eBay official forms of payment only! PayPal is eBay’s service to make payments for your eBay purchases! PLEASE CHECK VIRGINBEE EBAY STORE! VERY RARE & UNIQUE SPIRITUAL GIFTS! 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