North American Society for Intelligence History, 2022 annual meeting

What can we learn when we mix three ingredients rarely found in the same bowl—intelligence
history, business concepts, and postage stamps? What can we learn about the mindset of an
intelligence organization which offers the world, and itself, an outsized portion of falsehood?
What price does an organization pay when it cannot separate its own facts from fiction?
The paper takes an unusual approach to explore Soviet/Russian state security. Perspectives from
business research about strategic management and decision-making processes are applied to the
complex world of postage stamps. The approach can be used beyond this specific setting—stamps
are sources of information, and they provide an effective anchor for research.
Material from Russian archives and other sources shows that an astonishing number of post-Soviet
postage stamps—about two hundred—have direct or indirect links to state security and intelligence.
This paper discusses a subset—three sets of Russian stamps which commemorate seventeen people
in counterintelligence and military intelligence: a 2002 set of Cheka/OGPU/NKVD agents, a 2018
set of SMERSH agents, and a 2022 set of former KGB counterintelligence chiefs.