Word: commandant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Indeed it is. The KGB center, as its command complex of buildings is called, is located only a few blocks from the Kremlin-at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square. The dour, ocher-colored buildings look down on the Bolshoi Theater and the entrance to Red Square. The agency has a huge network of informers within the U.S.S.R., and it can often veto applications for new jobs, visas and university admissions. It operates prison camps and mental hospitals and directs the Soviet campaign against dissidents. Lubyanka Prison, where victims of Stalin's purges, such as Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, were executed...
...boss, Yuri Andropov, took command in 1967, and in 1973 became the first KGB head since Stalin's dreaded Lavrenti Beria to join the ruling Politburo. Andropov, 63, is said to admire modern art and to be a witty conversationalist who speaks fluent English-a portrait that contrasts with his harsh actions as Moscow's Ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 uprising. Under Andropov, says one Western analyst, "the thugs are being weeded...
...stronger. The KGB excels at recruiting new agents: with only some exaggeration, a West German intelligence expert says, "There is not one place in the world where the KGB does not have its man." Indeed, Superspy Colonel Rudolf Abel, apprehended in New York in 1957, was found to command a vast net work of agents that ranged over the entire North American continent. Today the KGB cooperates closely with the East German Ministry for Security, which in 1972 successfully planted an agent, Günter Guillaume, as a close aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Guillaume spirited NATO defense...
...diplomatic maneuvering over the Soviets' sagging satellite began in mid-December. It centered, at first, in a green-painted chamber housed half a mile deep within the solid pink granite of Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain, headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). There, technicians at the Space Defense Center track the 4,600 pieces of machinery now floating in space -including no fewer than 939 satellites...
...Antarctic. Its parabolic radar antenna scanned the seas for ship movement, and its radio transmitters relayed the collected information to Soviet ground stations. But in mid-December, Cosmos 954 began to droop in its orbit, slipping closer to earth with each revolution. The Soviets sent the satellite a radio command that should have caused it to separate into three sections, with the nuclear core soaring into an orbit up to 800 miles high, where it could circle for centuries-and yet still remain a lethal hazard if it finally returned to earth. But Cosmos 954 ignored the command...