Word: defector
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...former revolutionary, who joined Castro's movement at the age of 15, claimed that the Cuban leader has a stash of cash totaling several million dollars hidden away in Switzerland. "Who can sanction Castro?" asked the defector. "What parliament or national assembly can ask for an explanation of what is done with that money...
...Soul of Viktor Tronko (Doubleday; 350 pages; $17.95). The story is built on three staples of spy fiction: the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald spent time in the Soviet Union and must have had contact with the KGB; the inability of the CIA, whenever confronted with a Soviet defector, to know whether he is a font of information or a plant aimed at disinformation; and the too often paralyzing fear among senior spooks that a highly placed "mole" has compromised everything. Quammen traverses this established terrain with skill, deftly interweaving plots, achingly conveying the ordeal of a "hostile debriefing...
Cuban authorities quickly discredited the prize defector. For most of his career, they said, Del Pino had been a lowly flight instructor. He was grounded in January for psychological stress and eyesight problems, they added, and was assigned to organize an air force museum...
...South Africa's former Ambassador to Britain, came within just 39 votes of beating Minister of Constitutional Development Chris Heunis, the architect of Botha's reform program and his possible successor, in Heunis' once safe Helderberg district near Cape Town. In the Afrikaner university town of Stellenbosch, another Nationalist defector, Esther Lategan, was beaten by an incumbent M.P., though she managed to reduce her opponent's majority from 5,622 votes in 1981 to 1,781. Nonetheless, with the liberal parties in disarray and only one independent candidate actually making it into the new Parliament, the challenge to the government...
Baryshniknov is not the first prominent defector to receive feelers from Soviet officials about returning. Last week Ballerina Natalia Makarova got a similar offer from Grigorovich. The Soviets have also approached Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Novelist Vasily Aksyonov and Theater Director Yuri Lyubimov. Grigorovich noted that there is a new "atmosphere of openness" in the Soviet Union. Said he: "We now have a wise leader who is loved by the whole country...