The Illegal Residentura and the New Identity
Quick note: residentura is a term meaning a group of spies, particularly soviet or russian spies.
The Soviets maintained two residenturas in every country. The first was a legal residentura and the second was an illegal residentura. You can approximate these to official cover agents and non-official cover agents in the CIA.
Originally there was only a legal residentura but the Soviets quickly became frustrated that everytime a spy ring was busted it would be traced back to the embassy immediately, creating bad publicity and allowing the press to tie the spy ring to local communist party.
In the late 1920s they established illegal residenturas which quickly took over most of the intelligence operations. Illegal residenturas enjoyed wide latitude and performed all the risky operations. The legal residenturas were limitedin what they were allowed to do and prohibited from engaging in risky operations. While the legal residenturas were initially losing power and popularity, the Soviets began to see values in having two distinct and separate sets of agents collecting intelligence and decided to keep both. They found value in comparing the information collected by one to information collected by the other to help authenticate it.
Illegal residenturas could not use diplomatic pouches to send secrets back to Russia like the legals could.
One problem face by the illegals program was that they couldn’t find agents who spoke the language well enough to blend in. They solved this by having the agents pretend to be immigrants from another country (eg: polish immigrant living in the US). Potential agents were expected to meet most of the requirements for the illegals program on their own including: (1) speaking the target country’s language well enough to work, (2) speaking the legend’s language well enough to pass as a near native, (3) Prepare their own legend/backstory that would stand up to cursory investigation, and (4) acquire a legitimate occupation or business reason to live in the target country for an extended period of time.
The passport desk of the foreign directorate of the KGB would provide the passport (and presumably other documents). There were a number of ways in which this was accomplished. The most basic was to obtain genuine US passports and change the photos but this was discouraged because the photo would show as clearly doctored under the right lighting.
The second was to fabricate the entire passport from scratch. The KGB was very good at this and their fakes were undetectable. However, it had a major point of failure – there would be not records of issuing this fabricated passport at the passport issuance office if someone called to check.
Other methods would involve an agent already in the target country, or a friendly local, to falsify information to the passport office and get a passport issued in a new agent’s identity. Then send the new, genuine passport to the new agent. This solves the problem of not having a record in the passport office.
They would also just steal the identity of a child that was born at approximately the same time as the agent’s legend and also died shortly after birth. Variations of identity theft to accomplish the same.
Soviet women would also enter into fake marriages with sympathetic locals. In some cases this bestowed automatic citizenship upon the soviet woman depending on the country. This was very popular in the 1930s where young people engaged in an anti-fascist movement would happily lend their names to soviet illegal spies for this purpose.
All false documents and fake identities have a shelf life and there’s always a level of scrutiny that they can’t stand up to if the investigator is determined enough. Critical to know when you’re being investigated and how determined the investigator is.
Some KGB agents were busted when they travelled in the same region under multiple identities and a ticket checker, passport clerk or police officer remembered them.
American passports had enormous value to KGB agents abroad because US citizens wouldn’t be expected to speak English as a native would since so many immigrants and non-native speakers lived in the US.