Word: kgb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When a major Russian spy defects to the West, the CIA is usually so delighted that it can hardly wait to tell the story to the world press. The resulting headlines are expected to be a damaging blow to Soviet prestige in general and the KGB in particular. Last week, however, with an important new defector on its hands, the agency kept its mouth shut. It had nothing to say -not even to the State Department -when the West German government revealed that Evgeny Evgenievich Runge, who held the high rank of lieutenant colonel in the KGB, had made contact...
...Communist agents alone are operating there.) Bonn, to be sure, did not say very much about Runge, probably because it did not know very much. But it was bursting with news about the spies he had left behind. Operating since 1955 as a travelling jukebox salesman, the KGB colonel had been in charge of at least two spy rings, and he blew their covers when he left. The police moved in immediately. Government Prosecutor Ludwig Martin announced solemnly that "this is the most important case of espionage in the history of the Federal Republic...
Nevertheless, almost every time CIA calls attention to itself, there is a spate of demands that it be reviewed, reformed or removed. As a CIA man pointed out wryly last week, such criticism can only lead to great jubilation in the halls of Moscow's KGB, Department D-for Disinformation-the arm of Soviet counterespionage whose main function is to discredit CIA. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, when asked about increasing demands for heavier congressional surveillance over CIA, replied: "I don't believe in exploding our intelligence agency. The British...
Such nonsense is swept away when a seductive, blonde party intellectual shacks up with him and steals his books. Then she forces the two Englishmen to steal them back from a KGB agent's apartment, after which, naturally, P-G and Manning are kidnaped by the secret police and flung into jail. The book winds up with the two freed from prison and jetting home to London. The implication is that Proctor-Gould is now spying for the Russians. But is he really? Frayn doesn't say. The effect is illogical but somehow appropriate, as it is, perhaps...
These three novels might be described as documents of the vague and nervous neutralism to which Britain's intellectuals incline, a neutralism in which the villain is just as likely to be the CIA or MI-5 as the KGB, or in which the security system itself is made an object of loathing and derision. Precisely because they are popular, such books may indicate a state of mind. Together they may suggest a trend of British thought in marked divergence from that...