Active reserve (KGB) officers with a military rank who worked undercover in the Soviet Union. "Trusted contacts" were high placed civilians who collaborated with the KGB without signing any official working agreements, such as directors of personnel departments at various institutions, academics, deans, or writers and actors. Informers were citizens secretly recruited by the KGB, sometimes using forceful recruitment methods, such as blackmail. The precise number of people from various categories remains unknown, but one of the estimates was 11 million "informers" in the Soviet Union, or one out of every eighteen adult citizens The active reserve was established by Yuri Andropov in
Fedora (KGB agent) Additionally, Kulak told the FBI that the KGB's mole in the agency had given the Soviets codes the Americans used in their counter-intelligence work, which would have been a major coup and a closely guarded secret for the Soviets, and which appears to have been true. One argument made for Kulak possibly being a KGB double-agent falsely feeding information to the FBI is that when he returned to Moscow, he suffered no consequences, unlike Dmitri Polyakov who was executed when his work with the FBI was discovered by the KGB. In 1995, former KGB general Oleg Kalugin said in an