The spies who came to the East: Soviet illegals in the post-World War II Japan

ABSTRACT This article describes the Soviet illegals intelligence program that was established one hundred years ago. It offers a brief overview of the Soviet intelligence organizations involved in illegal intelligence, the essence of the illegal work, and the main phases of an illegal intelligence operation. In this context, Japan presents an interesting example to analyze as it has always been in the focus of Soviet intelligence. Three cases of the Soviet illegals, little known to the historians in the West, who operated in Japan from the mid-1950s till the mid-1990s, are looked into in bigger detail. The article shows that both the KGB and the GRU used a wide range of tools and methods to dispatch and run their operatives in Japan while showing a high degree of ingenuity.