The KGB’s Middle Eastern Cold War Theatre: Global and Domestic implications

This article analyzes the KGB’s multifaceted role in shaping Soviet policy in the Middle East during the Cold War, emphasizing the close interconnection between foreign operations and domestic security concerns within the USSR’s Muslim borderlands. Drawing on Soviet and Russian-language memoirs, declassified Baltic archives, KGB doctrinal materials, and Western Cold War scholarship, the study examines the KGB’s strategy and tactics through the regional perspective and analyses the KGB’s mechanisms of active measures, intelligence collection, counterintelligence, and ideological subversion. Special attention is given to the Soviet perception of Islam, Arab nationalism, Zionism, and non-state actors. The findings demonstrate that the KGB pursued a multilayered strategy that combined geopolitical, ideological, and internal security imperatives, making the Middle East a key arena of Soviet intelligence activity from the 1950s to 1991.