First Chief Directorate

The First Main Directorate (or First Chief Directorate, Russian: Первое главное управление, Pervoye glavnoye upravleniye) of the Committee for State Security of the USSR (PGU KGB) was the organization responsible for foreign operations and intelligence activities by providing for the training and management of covert agents, intelligence collection administration, and the acquisition of foreign and domestic political, scientific and technical intelligence in the Soviet Union. The First Chief Directorate was formed within the KGB directorate in 1954, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union was renamed as the Central Intelligence Service and finally the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Although the agency SVR restyle in 1991 implies a generic overseas surveillance activity, the primary foreign intelligence service in Russia and the Soviet Union has been the GRU, a military intelligence organization and special operations force shrouded in secrecy, most famed for stealing the blueprints of the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project and barring entry into its headquarters to anyone, even the leader of the Soviet Union proper, without a formal authentication.

From the beginning, foreign intelligence played an important role in the Soviet foreign policy. In the Soviet Union, foreign intelligence was formally formed in 1920, as a foreign department of Cheka (Inostrannyj Otdiel—INO). Soviet intelligence services were formed during the Russian Civil War of 1918–1920. On December 19, 1918, the Central Committee Bureau of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) had decided to combine front formations of Cheka and the Military Control Units, which were controlled by the Military Revolutionary Committee, and responsible for counter-intelligence activities, into one organ which was named Special Section (department) of Cheka. The head of the Special Section (department) was Mikhail Sergeyevich Kedrov. The task of the Special Section was to run human intelligence: to gather political and military intelligence behind enemy lines, and expose and neutralize counter-revolutionary elements in the Red Army. At the beginning of 1920, in Cheka's Special Section there was an under section named War Information Bureau (WIB) which conducted political, military, scientific and technical intelligence in surrounding countries. WIB headquarters was located in Kharkiv and was divided in two sections: Western and Southern.
Each section had six groups:

...
Wikipedia