Rick Spence

Well, if we go back again to the founder of Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky dies in 1926. Keels over after giving a... heated speech to a party meeting. Now, the common view, what you usually read, which was key for the time, is that, you know, clearly Stalin had him whacked because anytime someone died, it was almost always it. And I think a lot of times he did.

But in some cases, Stalin's probably getting blamed for things that he didn't actually do. Dzerzhinsky wasn't even opposed to Stalin. So it's not clear why he, but this was the, you know, Stalin died, you know, obviously he was poisoned. Something happened. It was an unnatural death. Somebody goes in for an operation, you know, it gets a little too much anesthesia. Stalin killed them.

Somebody tips over in a canoe in upstate New York. Stalin killed them. There's actually a case about that. So, That itself can be kind of useful where every time someone dies, they think you killed them. That's kind of an interesting method of intimidation in that regard. But the suspicion is nonetheless there. Dzerzhinsky had been, he was the grand inquisitor.

He was seemingly firmly in control of the organization. Of course, maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was. My guess would be is that if Dzerzhinsky's death was not natural causes, that he was probably eliminated by someone within his own organization. And then you look at the people who take over.

His immediate successor is Vyacheslav Menzinski, who's really not really a secret policeman, more a kind of intellectual dilettante. But if you look behind him, you'll notice the fellow is Henrik Jagoda. And Yagoda will really sort of manage things from behind the scenes until Mijinsky dies in 1934. And then Yagoda will hold on until he's a victim of the purges, I think, in 1937 or 1938.

Yagoda is ambitious, murderous. And if I was going to point the finger to anybody who possibly had Dzerzhinsky whacked, it would be him. And for the purposes simply of advancement. That's the, you know, the person to look out at any kind of corporate organization is...

your immediate subordinate, the person who could move into your job, because more than likely, that's exactly what they're planning to do.

Well, there's an interesting little acronym called MICE. M-I-C-E. And it's generally used. And it's just the way in which you would acquire. How do you get people to work for you? Well, M stands for money. You pay them. People are greedy. They want money. You know, if you look at Aldrich Ames, he had a very, very expensive wife with expensive tastes. So he wanted money. I is for ideology.

So during, particularly in the 1920s and the 1930s, the Soviets were very effective in exploiting communists, you know, people who wanted to serve the great cause. Even though that's initially not really what they wanted to do, because the idea was that if you recruit agents from among, let's say, American communists, you compromise the party.

Because exactly what your enemies are going to say is that all communists are

soviet spies they're all traitors in some way so you would really want to keep those two things separate but ideology was just so convenient and those people would just work for you so well they were you could get them to do anything betray their grandmother they would go ahead and do that for the greater good so ideology can be a motivation uh and that can be you know someone who is a um

who is a devoted Marxist-Leninist. It can also be someone who's a disgruntled communist because there's no anti-communist like an ex-communist. Those who lose the faith can become very, very useful. For instance, if you look in the case of American intelligence, the people who essentially... temporarily destroyed much of the KGB organization in the U.S.

post-World War II, were people like Whitaker Chambers, Louis Boudin, Elizabeth Bentley. All of those people had been Communist Party members. They had all been part of the Red Faithful. They all, for one reason or another, became disillusioned and turned rat or patriot, whichever case you may want to...

put in that regard what does the c and the e stand for the c is for coercion that's where you have to persuade someone to work for you you have to pressure them so usually you blackmail them you know that could be they have a gambling habit uh you know in the old days it's very often because they were gay okay gets them a decision where they can be compromised

And you can get them to do your bidding. Those people usually have a certain amount of control. Here's an interesting example of how the Okrana tended to handle this. I think it's still largely used. You'd round up a bunch of revolutionaries on some charge or another, distributing revolutionary literature, running an illegal printing press.

You bring a guy into the room and you say, okay, you're going to work for us. He, of course, would refuse to do so. And they go, well, if you refuse, we'll keep the rest of your comrades in jail for a while. You know, maybe beat them with a rubber truncheon or so. And then we're just going to let you go. We're just going to put you back out on the street.

And if you don't work for us, we will spread the rumor through our agents already in your organization that you are. And then what will your comrades do? How long are you going to live? So you see, you have no choice. You're ours and you're going to cooperate with us.

And the way that that effectiveness would be ensured is that you have multiple agents within the same organization who don't know who each other are. That's very important. And they'll all be filing reports. So let's say you have three agents inside the central committee.

of the SR party and there's a committee meeting and you're going to look at the reports that fail, they all better agree with each other, right? If one person doesn't report what the other two do, then perhaps they're not entirely doing their job and they can be liquidated at any time. All you do is drop the dime on them. And this was done periodically.

In fact, in some cases you would betray your own agents just to completely discombobulate to the organization. This happened in one particular case around 1908.