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Old 08-19-2021, 03:18 AM
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ChalkLine ChalkLine is offline
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The KGB
(Russian: Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) "The Committee for State Security".

I see the KGB mentioned a lot and I thought I'd define who they are and what they do in the Twilight War to clear a few things up.

First up, the KGB is a counter-intelligence military organisation. They are separate from the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) and the SSV (the Soviet Ground Forces). Regardless of what they did in peacetime they have two primary functions in war time; defeat domestic espionage and to succeed in foreign espionage. This will take the form of two main operations, the first being hunting down and capturing foreign agents in the USSR and the second is to maintain intelligence webs in enemy countries and to carry out acts of sabotage.

As you can see, they have no place on the battlefield. About the only time you might encounter them would be in either a NATO-held Canton or in Kraków and even then they would be loathe to be found out. For the KGB their secrecy is their armour, they depend on it to survive.

The KGB does not hunt spies in other Warsaw Pact nations, they have the native intelligence organisations do that instead. They do maintain a liaison officer in each branch and are part of any Warsaw Pact intelligence command chain. Very little is known how this command structure worked but they seemed to have had a dual-reporting system where they let other nations do their thing but had to be kept in the loop.

Sabotage units do not liaise with special forces units such as Spetsnaz. Instead they create their own cells of saboteurs that source equipment through deniable channels to create confusion in the enemy. For instance it is likely that a saboteur operating in the USA would be American and armed with US equipment.

All the other stuff, the military intelligence operations you'd see in Europe, is done by the GRU. If you have the (frankly silly) "Division Cuba" in your campaign then all the spook stuff should be done by GRU officers and their attendant Spetsnaz.
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