Patriarch Kirill worked for the KGB and carried out intelligence activities in the 1970s in favor of the Soviet Union. The Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger writes about this, referring to declassified police archives. We are talking about the period when Vladimir Gundyaev, who had the operational pseudonym Mikhailov, was the official representative of the Moscow Patriarchate at the World Council of Churches in Geneva.
According to Tages-Anzeiger, the journalists looked at documents in the archives of the Swiss Federal Police for the period from 1969 to 1989, which, they say, confirm that Gundyaev was connected to the KGB. After that, he returned to the USSR and began to move rapidly in the church hierarchy.
In 1971, the 24-year-old priest Kirill was allowed to move to Geneva to represent Russian Orthodox believers at the World Council of Churches.
In his autobiography, the former consul at the Soviet embassy in Geneva, Vadim Melnikov, calls Kirill not just a diplomat, but a KGB officer. From Soviet documents released later, historians and journalists concluded that Patriarch Kirill worked for the KGB in Geneva under the pseudonym Mikhailov. He was supposed to collect information about the members of the World Council of Churches and influence their attitude towards the Soviet Union.
The Russian Orthodox Church declined to comment on Kirill's alleged espionage activities in Geneva, while the WCC says it has "no information" on the matter.