CIA infiltration of Ukrainian secret services, part I

The man with the plastic bag, introduction to 'the organs', WW2 Nazis, the FSB

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The man with the plastic bag

It was a hot summer Saturday, and I was sitting in radiorynok (radio market). Beyond the unstable piles of dusty electronics, guarded by wise men in grey jackets, there is a café next to a forested valley. The café is on stilts, overhanging the steep descent.

This is how you enter radiorynok. The cafe is at the end of the path in the centre of this photo.

Inside radiorynok. The shops are closed in this photo, but there’s always someone around selling something or other, or just hanging out.

I was reading a Samir Amin book on my laptop and taking notes while enjoying a beer. The café also sold cheap meat snacks and kompot juice. The only other people there were two tables away from me – a fat man and a skinny man, both in their 40s or 50s. They were discussing the annexation of Crimea, how it was a government conspiracy and so on, the parlous state of the country generally.

I didn’t listen much but occasionally something came through to me. In any case, I had been there for a long time, before them. Then the skinny man left, and the fatter man – but fat in the way that middle aged Ukrainian can be, where its as if they don’t have an ounce of fat, just muscle that has an outwards resemblance to fat, but which gives the impression that it is steely hard if touched – remained. He called out to me – ‘hey, were you writing all that down?’ I had already somewhat forgotten the topic of conversation, and jokingly responded, ‘of course’.

He called me over, I went over, why not, I like talking to characters. He had narrow tinted grey sunglasses, and a cheap plastic bag. ‘Where are you from’ – I told him my convoluted story – ‘No, where are you really from?’ I replied I wasn’t lying. ‘I’m from the organs, we have ways to make you talk’. ‘Here in Ukraine, all kinds of things happen. Anything can happen. Maybe we’ll come to your house tomorrow and take you back to the base, find out where you’re really from’. He said it calmly, in the way that only drunk east Slavs can. His eyes were blank. I found it a bit weird, but also funny.

After I left, I started feeling worried. I can have a tendency to exaggerate threats (and underestimate real dangers). My girlfriend was outraged that I fell for such an idiot – ‘carrying a fucking plastic bag and drinking a beer at midday, he’s a bum not someone from the organs!’. Weeks later, we went back to the café, which I quite liked and missed. He was there.

Once he saw us, he pulled out his phone - ‘Yes, I’ll take them over to you quite soon. The rest of the police already know. Get ready, you can meet us on the way’. This infuriated my girlfriend, and I couldn’t stop her from standing up. She walked up to him and threw the water on his cheap nokia, loudly apologizing, then walking onwards. We went through a construction site and into an Arabic restaurant, where we had fun observing some third-tier Arab businessmen meeting with their young female Ukrainian colleagues. The Arabs spoke Arabic and the Ukrainians spoke to each other about fashion and the joys of Dubai. One was convincing the other of how wonderful Dubai is, the endless shopping potential.

What are ‘the organs’

‘The organs’ is what people sometimes call the SBU – Sluzhba Bespeky Ukrainy, Security Services of Ukraine. Though it emerged out of the Soviet KGB, the name comes from World War 2. Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army created a spy service called the SBU in 1940. It engaged in everything needed by an insurgent group engaged in genocide against Poles and Jews, counter-insurgency against pro-Soviet Ukrainian and Polish partisans, and the struggle against pro-Soviet spies. Mykola Lebed’, leader of the SBU, advocated - and implemented - the total extermination of Jews and Poles in territories controlled by Ukrainian nationalists.

‘“I…fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine…. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine…” - Lebed’, July 1941

[we must] “cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population” [so that a resurgent Polish state doesn’t reclaim the territories] - Lebed’, 1943

Mykola Lebed’, wartime creator of the ‘organs’

It goes without saying that the Ukrainian KGB was not particularly separate from the rest of the Soviet KGB apparatus. However, while I know little about this topic, I would not be surprised if the 1980s already saw the progressive ‘privatization’ of the local KGB by Ukrainian party bosses and rising economic conglomerates.

In any case, after the fall of the USSR the Ukrainian and Russian remnants of the KGB – the SBU and the FSB – saw a similar evolution. Soldatov and Borogan’s book the New Nobility, focused on the FSB, outlines it well. Like everything in the ‘newly liberated’ Soviet bloc, the secret services were privatized. Not by decree, but in reality – various operatives took on their own business projects – security, private military, business consultancy, real estate, activities hardly distinguishable from racket.  

In Ukraine, this process never stopped. The disintegration of the SBU into competing fiefdoms continually intensified. Unlike in Russia, where the secret services took more political power and squeezed out much of the business elite, in Ukraine the business elite continued consolidating their power and using the SBU as weapons against each other.

 One of the greatest characters I ever met in Ukraine, a Romanian restaurant owner I will call Nichita who I met in his Kiev penthouse on February 27, 2022, himself suffered from the SBU’s depredations. A rival Ukrainian restaurant owner wanted Nichita’s restaurant gone. So he got the SBU to accuse Nichita of ‘sponsoring separatist terrorism’, itself a favourite tactic by the SBU and rightwingers to eradicate business competitors. Luckily Nichita was able to deal with this threat – ‘I am from Romania after all, I know how to work with corruption’. Not everyone is so skilful. More on Nichita in upcoming articles.

This political economy makes the SBU’s internal politics quite extravagant. It is filled with constant revelations about x leader being a ‘Russian spy’, his swift removal from office, his replacement with a rival… This even happened in wartime, with Ivan Bakanov suspended from his role as head of SBU in July 2022 due to revelations about various top SBU figures working for Russia. He was replaced with the exquisitely gangster-like Vasyl Malyuk.

Malyuk. The name, by the way, means something like ‘little guy’.

The SBU’s fracturing along business lines was also lined onto regional divisions. The SBU in Donetsk was loyal to the Donetsk elite, with SBU alpha leader Alexander Khodakovsky essentially serving as Rinat Akhmetov’s (Ukraine’s richest man) personal security force. In the rest of Ukraine, the SBU also carried out the dirty work of the regional politico-economic elite.

In Ukraine, regional economic divisions also roughly mapped onto spheres mined for influence by more powerful foreign blocs. Roughly, because in fact all blocs concerned had their fingers in SBU cells across the country. While I will be looking at US involvement in the SBU in western and eastern Ukraine, one would be hard pressed to find a city without allegations of ‘FSB infiltration’ of the SBU. In the next article, I will have a look at the process of CIA infiltration of the SBU that took place over the 21st century - organ-stealing.