Word: blackmailed
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...unification of the Congo. Stunned reporters were told that Katanga would "ask for and accept Russian help"-despite the fact that the Soviet Union has long denounced Tshombe as a "Belgian stooge" kept in power only by the backing of Western capitalists. European diplomats testily dismissed this attempted blackmail of the West and the U.N. as a piece of "dangerous skulduggery...
...wild. Themselves abused in the past, they suddenly became outrageously abusive. New publications and agencies proliferated; at one time there were 128 dailies and 311 news agencies, many run by shady operators who never published a single issue but used them as fronts for smuggling operations, black-marketeering or blackmail. Reporters, paid $30 to $40 a month, were ordered to exhume scandals concerning government officials and army officers, then to extort money from them with the threat of publication. Newspapers were choked with unsubstantiated reports, rumors and wildly intemperate criticism of the government. Said one disgusted U.S. embassy official...
...officer must drill himself never to quote a source by name for fear a U.S. agent will be identified or an innocent acquaintance charged with espionage. He can never talk shop with his wife or pass on gossip that could reveal a colleague's foibles and lead to blackmail. With friends, he must listen closely to others' conversation, be continually alert to give or obey the service's traditional signal to change the subject: a long, pointed look at the ceiling. In time, the naturally communicative, libertarian American citizen tends to react to constant surveillance with moods...
...bugs are mostly concealed in diplomatic offices, cars and homes, where they are often as thick as cockroaches. A favorite spot is under or even in a bed, where the bugs might pick up useful leads for blackmail. For many U.S. families in Iron Curtain countries, sleuthing for bugs has become a kind of sport, an indoor counterpart to the Easter egg hunt. One couple in a satellite capital boasts that its cocker spaniel can sniff out a bug as surely as a pig snuffling a truffle. But new bugs always take their place...
...regard to the sacrifices the President has called for: Is the payment of blackmail and tribute one of them...