By Graeme Strachan

RUSSIAN SPIES created secret maps of Dundee and Dunfermline during the cold war as the KGB plotted world domination.

As part of the most total global survey ever attempted, the Russian military developed detailed, accurate maps of almost every country in the world.

The maps show Scotland’s major cities—Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee—but also less apparent tactical targets such as Kilmarnock and Dunfermline.

They include many details not shown in any Ordnance Survey map, including military facilities, the width of key roads and even whether buildings are fireproofed.

Satellite images, high-altitude aerial reconnaissance and spies on the ground were used to collect all possible information which was sent back to 50,000 cartographers in Moscow.

After the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and the rushed withdrawal of the Russian military from the Baltic states, thousands of paper maps covering the whole world were found in abandoned train carriages in Latvia and Estonia.

To this day, no one knows if the Russians left them behind by accident or whether locals on the ground diverted the trains.

The extraordinary documents have been gathered by map expert and cartography collector John Davies, who found them during a visit to Latvia.

“I have been researching the history of the Soviet global mapping project and, in particular, the large scale plans of British and Irish towns and cities produced from 1950s to 1990,” he said.

“These are of astonishing accuracy and contain an amazing level of detail, especially as they were compiled under great secrecy.

“Realising the military, economic and political benefits of topographic information, their military set about mapping the world, a mammoth task that took over 50 years—before, during and after the cold war—to complete.

“Today, very little is known about how the organisation was structured and how such incredible results were achieved. Certainly the operation was militarily driven, very well controlled, achieving spectacular results.

“Ultimately futile of course, if the purpose was world domination, but for mapping professionals they provide a fascinating and invaluable insight as to the structure of our towns and use of land during this period.

“You have got to speculate as to how maps of these complexity were put together.

“A lot of it could have been done through aerial surveillance, either by satellite or high-altitude reconnaissance planes.

“But the maps also include detail which just could not have been observed from the air. That means they almost certainly had people on the ground in the UK compiling these maps.”

It’s not the first time that Dundee has been revealed as having been targeted by the east.

East Germany’s feared secret police tried to coax Scotland’s students into spying for them during the 1970s and 80s, to gain access to the British establishment.

Professor Ian Wallace (65) was spied on by the Stasi while he worked for Dundee University and asked to recruit “pro-GDR” writers to influence the editorial content of the university’s academic journal on East Germany.

He said the Stasi attempted to influence the editorial content of Dundee University’s academic journal GDR Monitor on a visit to East Germany in the early 1980s.

“I was asked to speak to the secretary of the writers’ union—it was clearly a Stasi placement and, in fact, it’s quite clear from records that have appeared since that he had a direct link to Stasi,” he said.

“He was trying to get me to publish in the GDR Monitor some works by GDR-friendly writers, and try to influence the editorial content—but it never happened. I refused.”

His name was included in a list of academics handed to the secret police in 1978 by Edinburgh student Robin Pearson, who was eventually exposed as a spy in 1999.

Pearson’s task was to collect information to provide insights into the motives, the course and the purpose of the UK’s policy of contacts with the GDR.

An Arbroath woman, Helen Anderson, was also revealed to have passed documents to East Germany’s security services while working on a US navy base in West Berlin.

Before the collapse of communist East Germany, the country ran one of the most extensive intelligence networks in the world.

The Stasi consisted of as many as 150,000 agents by the time of its demise in 1990. It was much more than a junior partner to the Soviet Union’s KGB.