KGB archiver--- the new compression standard?

KGB Operations within the United States Main article: History of Soviet espionage in the United States [edit] Pre-Cold War As the Soviet regime had viewed the United States as a lower priority target than Britain and other European countries, the KGB had been slow to establish an agent network there. Responsibilities for infiltration thus fell to the GRU, which recruited Julian Wadleigh and probably Alger Hiss, who began providing documents from the State Department. The KGB, at that time called the NKVD, first made its presence known in 1935 with the establishment of a legal residency under Boris Bazarov and an illegal residency under Iskhak Akhmerov. The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its general secretary Earl Browder assisted with recruitment efforts, and soon the KGB’s network was providing high-grade intelligence from within the United States government and defense and technology firms. Among the most important agents gathering political intelligence recruited during this time period were Laurence Duggan and Michael Straight, who passed classified State Department documents, Harry Dexter White, who performed a similar role in the Treasury Department, and Lauchlin Currie, an economic adviser to Roosevelt. A notorious spy ring, the Silvermaster group run by Greg Silvermaster, also operated at this time, though it was somewhat detached from the KGB itself. The KGB thus succeeded in penetrating major branches of the United States government at a time when the US had no significant countervailing espionage operations in the Soviet Union. When Whittaker Chambers, a former courier for Hiss and others, approached Roosevelt with information fingering Duggan, White, and others as Soviet spies, his claims were dismissed as nonsense. At the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences, Stalin was vastly better informed about what cards the United States held in its bargaining deck than Roosevelt or Truman was about Stalin. In scientific intelligence the KGB achieved an even more spectacular success. British physicist Klaus Fuchs, recruited by the GRU in 1941, was part of the British team collaborating with the United States in the Manhattan Project. Fuchs was the most prominent agent handled by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in their spy ring. The New York residency also infiltrated Los Alamos with its recruitment of then nineteen-year-old Harvard physicist Theodore Hall in 1944; Lona Cohen served as his courier. The stealing of the secrets to the atomic bomb was only the capstone of the Soviet espionage effort in the scientific community. Soviet agents reported back information on advancements in the fields of jet propulsion, radar, and encryption, among others. The unraveling of the KGB’s network came about as a result of some key defections, like that of Elizabeth Bentley and Igor Gouzenko, and the Venona project (VENONA) decrypts. Bentley, a courier to the Silvermaster group, had fallen out with Akhmerov and started informing on her former spies to the FBI in 1945. Her efforts, and the resulting "spy mania" in the United States, led to the recall of most of the senior staff, leaving the spy network temporarily headless. Information on VENONA, which threatened to compromise the entire spy network, caused shock and panic within KGB headquarters. However, damage was minimized as KGB agent William Weisband and then SIS Washington Kim Philby passed on information about VENONA and agents it identified from 1947 onwards, 5 years before the CIA was informed. Still, the KGB had to rebuild most of its operations from scratch, and never again would achieve such thorough penetration of a foreign power. [edit] Cold War The KGB attempted, largely without success, to rebuild its illegal residencies in the United States during the Cold War. The residue effects of the Red Scare and McCarthyism and the evisceration of the CPUSA severely damaged KGB efforts at recruitment. The last major illegal, "Willie" Vilyam Fisher, better known as Rudolf Abel, was betrayed by his assistant Reino Häyhänen in 1957, in all likelihood leaving the KGB without a single illegal residency in the United States, at least for a major span of time. Legal residencies were more successful. The KGB’s recruitment efforts turned towards mercenary agents recruited because of monetary, not ideological, reasons. It was particularly successful in gathering scientific intelligence, as firms such as IBM retained lax security while security within the government tightened. By the 1980’s though, intelligence was at a low ebb. It was at this time that the KGB scored its most important intelligence coup of the Cold War with the walk-ins of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, who compromised dozens of undercover Soviet agents, including Gordievsky, who was now on the verge of being appointed as head of the British legal residency. Ames and Hanssen were paid millions of dollars for their effort. [edit] KGB Operations in the United Kingdom [edit] Pre-Cold War and the Cambridge Five See also: Cambridge Five Heydar Aliyev was the first Muslim member of KGB in 1944.Soviet intelligence collection in the United Kingdom before the Cold War was greatly aided by the fact that the security of sensitive places such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, MI5, and MI6 was weak and unsuspecting of Soviet or Communist espionage attempts. Arnold Deutsch, a brilliant academic, targeted the University of Cambridge for recruitment opportunities since the first of the Five to come to his attention, Kim Philby, was a graduate of Trinity College. Through Cambridge, Deutsch eventually recruited Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross, and Anthony Blunt, all of whom were to assume high-ranking positions in either the Foreign Office or the intelligence community. Key operations included Kim Philby, as head of Soviet counter-intelligence in MI6 (Section IX), was able to neutralize the United Kingdom’s counterespionage efforts against the Soviet Union. Philby, as SIS Washington station commander, had access to the VENONA decrypts and was able to notify the Soviet Union of the unmasking of many of its agents, including Klaus Fuchs, whom the agency failed to save, and Maclean, who was exfiltrated to the Soviet Union while under surveillance, accompanied by his friend Burgess. Cairncross, in his position at Bletchley Park, provided intelligence on the Ultra decrypts that was instrumental in the Soviet victory in the Battle of Kursk. In addition, all five members were able to furnish thousands of classified documents to the Soviet Union, heavily compromising many sections of British classified science, policies, and intelligence. The eventual downfall of the five began with the flight of Maclean and Burgess. Burgess, who had been rooming with Philby in Washington, immediately placed Philby under suspicion, and he resigned his high-level position under pressure. Blunt and Cairncross would soon be discovered as well. [edit] Cold War One of the KGB’s most important sources of scientific intelligence, Melita Norwood, who held a sensitive job at the Non-Ferrous Metals Association, remained undetected, and continued to provide important information regarding nuclear research and other areas of scientific progress to the KGB. In general, the collection of scientific and technological intelligence continued to prosper, but political intelligence declined. Operations suffered a disastrous setback after the mass expulsion of 105 KGB and GRU officers in September, 1971 (Operation FOOT), following information provided by the defector Oleg Lyalin. The KGB in Britain was never to really recover. [edit] KGB operations in the Soviet bloc The KGB, along with its satellite state intelligence agency allies, monitored extensively public and private opinion, subversion, and possible revolutionary plots in the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. It played an instrumental role in the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, the destruction of the 1968 Prague Spring and "socialism with a human face," and general operations to prop up Soviet-friendly puppet states in the bloc. During the Hungarian uprising, the chairman of the KGB, Ivan Serov, personally visited Hungary in order to supervise the "normalization" of Hungary following the invasion of the Red Army. The KGB monitored incidences of "harmful attitudes" and "hostile acts" in the satellite states as minute as listening to pop music. But it was during the Prague Spring that the KGB was to have the greatest role in bringing down a regime. The KGB began preparing the way for the Red Army by infiltrating Czechoslovakia with a large number of illegals posing as Western tourists. In classic KGB fashion they attempted to gain the confidence of some of the most outspoken proponents of the new Alexander Dubcek government in order to pass on information about their activities. Additionally, the illegals were tasked with planting evidence that rightist groups with the help of Western intelligence agencies were planning to overthrow the government in order to justify a Soviet invasion. Finally, the KGB prepared hardline, pro-Soviet members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), such as Alois Indra and Vasil Bilak, to assume power following the invasion. The betrayal of the often courageous leaders of the Prague Spring did not leave untouched the KGB's own agents, however; the famous defector Oleg Gordievsky would later remark, "It was that dreadful event, that awful day, which determined the course of my own life" (The Sword and the Shield, 261). The KGB’s success in Czechoslovakia would be matched by a relatively unsuccessful suppression of the Solidarity labor movement in Poland in the 1980’s. The KGB had forecast future instability in Poland with the election of the first Polish Pope, Karol Wojtyla, known better as Pope John Paul II, who had been categorized as subversive through his sermons critic

KGB (transliteration of "???") is the Russian-language abbreviation for Committee for State Security, (Russian: ?????´?? ?????´?????????? ?????´??????? (help·info); Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti). From March 13, 1954 to November 6, 1991 KGB was the umbrella organization name for the Soviet Union's premier security, secret police, and intelligence agency. The term KGB is also used in a more general sense to refer to the Soviet State Security organization since its foundation as the Cheka in 1917. Roughly, the KGB's operational domain encompassed functions and powers like those exercised by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the counter-intelligence (internal security) division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Federal Protective Service, and the Secret Service. The first of the forerunners of the KGB, the Cheka, was established on December 20, 1917, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky and personally praised by Vladimir Lenin as a "devastating weapon against countless conspiracies and countless attempts against Soviet power by people who are infinitely stronger than us" (The Sword and the Shield, 29-30). It replaced the Tsarist Okhranka. The Cheka underwent several name and organizational changes over the years, becoming in succession the State Political Directorate (OGPU) (1923), People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) (1941), and Ministry for State Security (MGB) (1946), among others. In March 1953, Lavrenty Beria consolidated the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the MGB into one body--the MVD; within a year, Beria was executed and MVD was split. The re-formed MVD retained its police and law enforcement powers, while the second, new agency, KGB, assumed internal and external security functions, and was subordinate to the Council of Ministers. On July 5, 1978 the KGB was re-christened as the "KGB of the Soviet Union", with its chairman holding a ministerial council seat. The KGB was dissolved when its chief, Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkov, used the KGB's resources in aid of the August 1991 coup attempt to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. On August 23, 1991 Colonel-General Kryuchkov was arrested, and General Vadim Bakatin was appointed KGB Chairman--and mandated to dissolve the KGB of the Soviet Union. On November 6, 1991, the KGB officially ceased to exist. Its services were divided into two separate organisations; the FSB for Internal Security and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) for Foreign Intelligence Gathering. The Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB) is functionally much like the Soviet KGB. From its inception, the KGB was envisioned as the "sword and shield" of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The KGB achieved a remarkable string of successes in the early stages of its history. The then comparatively lax security of foreign powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom allowed the KGB unprecedented opportunities to penetrate the foreign intelligence agencies and government with its own, ideologically-motivated agents such as the Cambridge Five. Arguably the Soviet Union’s most important intelligence coup, detailed information concerning the building of the atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project), occurred due to well-placed KGB agents such as Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall. The KGB also pursued enemies of the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin such as the counter-revolutionary White Guards and Leon Trotsky, eventually resulting in Trotsky’s assassination. During the Cold War, the KGB played a critical role in the survival of the Soviet one-party state through its suppression of political dissent (termed "ideological subversion") and hounding of notable public figures such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. It also achieved notable successes in the foreign intelligence arena, including continued gathering of Western science and technology from agents like Melita Norwood and the infiltration of West Germany’s government under Willy Brandt alongside the Stasi. However, the double blow of the compromise of existing KGB operations through high-profile defections like those of Elizabeth Bentley in the United States and Oleg Gordievsky in Britain, as well as the drying up of ideological recruitment after the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring, resulted in a major decline in the extent of the KGB’s capabilities. However, the KGB was assisted by some mercenary Western defectors such as the CIA mole Aldrich Ames and the FBI mole Robert Hanssen, helping to partly counteract its own hemorrhage of skilled agents.

yeah i've heard the compression is gud but it takes a long time to compress and uncompress. also compression depends on system config, ie ,more ram and processing power, more the speed and compression.