Spy work

What Happened to the KGB When the Soviet Union Folded?

If you're passing the time by binge-watching episodes of the critically-acclaimed TV series "The Americans," you may have grown fascinated with the story of a married couple living in the Washington, D.C. suburbs during the 1980s, who struggle to protect a dark secret. They're actually operatives for the KGB, the Soviet spy agency that during the Cold War battled clandestinely with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and other Western nations' intelligence organizations. The KGB — a Russian acronym that stands for Committee for State Security — became infamous in those years, thanks to its prowess at stealing secrets and assassinating perceived enemies abroad, as well as crushing domestic dissent. In the process it provided subject material for numerous movies and literary thrillers by novelists such as John le Carré and Martin Cruz Smith.

Since the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist back in 1991, you might assume that the KGB vanished with it. Indeed, after the hammer-and-sickle flag on the Kremlin was replaced by the tricolor of the Russian Federation that nation's first president, Boris Yeltsin, dismantled the agency and dispersed its functions among various other parts of the new government. In reality, though, intelligence experts say the KGB never really went away. Instead, like spies often do, it simply has resurfaced with a different name, FSB, whose letters stand in Russian for Federal Security Service. And today, with a former KGB agent and FSB head named Vladimir Putin as the head of state, the organization once known as the KGB seems to have regained much of its old reach and power.