A Day In History

Russia's Top Secret Assassination Squad: KGB's 13th Division (2022x66)

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In 1940, the Bolshevik revolutionary and first head of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, was offed in Mexico City. Trotsky fled the Soviet Union in 1928 after he came out at the bottom of a power struggle with Josef Stalin, a position many people had found themselves in. The offing of real and imagined foes had a long history in Russia. Still, it was during the early Soviet era when an entire branch of the intelligence gathering and spy apparatus of the country was given its own very top secret department within the NKVD in 1936. The department was called the "Directorate of Special Tasks." The NKVD underwent many changes after WWII and became the "MGB." In the MGB, the department was known as "Spets Byuro #1" for "Special Purpose Office #1". It was also known by more sinister and 007-like names such as "The Chamber" and "Lab #1".