Robert Brestan, HlidaciPes.org
Arson attacks, bombings, assassinations of political opponents or defected agents, and disinformation campaigns have long been staples in the arsenal of Russian intelligence services—both today and during the Cold War. Under the leadership of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin, Russia has deliberately built on the legacy of the Soviet KGB, which, after 1948, also trained trusted comrades in communist Czechoslovakia.
It was July 1965 when the Soviet ship Velikij Ustjug set sail from the Cuban port of Nuevitas, carrying a highly explosive cargo. Its destination was a covert warehouse operated by a special unit of the communist Czechoslovak State Security (StB) in Zadní Kopanina, near Prague.
On board were nine crates of undeclared goods, items that certainly could not have crossed borders so freely under normal circumstances.
According to records from the Czech Security Services Archive, the shipment contained over 100 kilograms of explosives, plastic explosives, one American anti-tank mine, dozens of incendiary mines, three submachine guns with magazines (two American and one Swedish), and an AF 9 mm pistol with a silencer.
The value of this arsenal lay not in its relatively modest quantity but in its highly useful origin for covert operations.
Trophies from the Bay of Pigs
“For the weapons and explosives used by the Special Operations Service, the intelligence branch of the StB, it was a requirement that their origin could not be directly traced to any state in the socialist bloc,” explains Peter Rendek, head of the 6th Department at the Security Services Archive, who discovered and analyzed the relevant documents.
The shipment in question perfectly met this condition: it consisted of trophy weapons and explosives seized by the Cubans during the failed U.S. invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
By late July, the Russian ship, along with the Czechoslovak cargo, reached the Russian port of Kaliningrad, from where the shipment was transported by a Ministry of the Interior plane to Prague.
The StB then conducted tests at secret locations and training grounds, experimenting with how and where to place explosives to destroy oil or gas pipelines and other infrastructure. “These experiments continued until 1968, but so far, no documents have been found indicating that such a live operation was ever carried out,” Rendek says.
Limited information exists about a planned operation targeting infrastructure in Algeria, where explosions were intended to be blamed on American imperialists. The explosives were secretly transported from Czechoslovakia to the target location, but the operation was ultimately halted by the KGB, citing a “changed international situation.”
“Soviet intelligence officials required the StB to consult with them on the selection and development of targets and objectives. They expressed particular interest in, for example, a waterworks facility in West Berlin, shipyards in Emden critical to military vessel production, or the port of Hamburg. Potential targets also included an oil pipeline between Le Havre and Paris, a pipeline crossing the Rhine River, or high-voltage power lines between West Germany and Austria,” Rendek lists.
A Package for Mr. Pelikán
The communist Special Operations Service, a unit within the StB, was tasked not only with demonstrative actions such as attacks on infrastructure, oil pipelines, and gas pipelines but also with subversive activities against the West and the physical elimination of individuals deemed traitors.
January 2025 marked exactly 50 years since an assassination attempt on Jiří Pelikán, an emigrant, politician, and publisher of the exile magazine Listy, in Rome. This is perhaps the most well-known operation of the communist intelligence service’s Special Operations Service.
Two StB officers, Jaroslav Forst (codename Fukan) and Milan Jelínek (codename Brodský), sent Pelikán a bomb disguised as a book, presented as a supposed gift for his 52nd birthday.
According to historians, Pelikán found the package suspicious. When he handled it cautiously, it began to emit smoke. He survived the subsequent explosion without serious injury.
While the communist StB—and its practices—are now history, little has changed on the Russian side, as Peter Rendek points out:
“The Russians continue to carry out these subversive operations. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB saw virtually no personnel changes, maintaining its continuity. Putin and his circle are former communists and KGB operatives.”
Chaos and Distrust in Society
“The history of Soviet and subsequent Russian active measures and disinformation campaigns is long and deep. The only difference lies in the tools. What was once print media is now the internet. The core remains the same: it is directly supported, directed, and funded by the state,” Rendek adds.
He believes historical archives can still be used today to understand and study how Russian propaganda operates: “In the archives, we are sitting on a treasure trove of sources documenting how active measures were devised and spread, how disinformation was crafted, and how people responded to it. This should be better utilized today. We must learn from history, including the fact that active measures targeted not only external audiences but also domestic ones.”
According to Rendek, Russian tactics remain largely unchanged: “Take, for example, the Soviet KGB’s Operation Denver in the 1980s, which spread disinformation claiming that the AIDS virus was artificially created and disseminated as a weapon originating in U.S. military research facilities. A similar approach was evident with information about COVID-19 or alleged secret U.S. laboratories in Ukraine.”
Russia continues to employ similar principles in other areas as well: testing its adversaries’ reactions, sowing uncertainty, chaos, and distrust within societies.
