Word: kgb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...every KGB spy abroad there are five working within the Soviet Union. The Second and Fifth Chief Directorates employ an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 agents who are responsible for domestic security, including operatives assigned to the surveillance of dissidents, foreign students, journalists and diplomats in the U.S.S.R. American security officers who searched the residence of one U.S. diplomat in Moscow in 1978 found 42 microphones...
Western intelligence experts estimate the KGB's present strength at 500,000. Of these, 90,000 are believed to be directly involved in intelligence and counterintelligence work. An estimated 300,000 are uniformed troops responsible for the safety of the country's leaders and the protection of its borders. The other KGB employees perform administrative duties and help run prisons, concentration camps and those psychiatric institutions in which dissidents are often held...
...KGB headquarters in Moscow is a grim, gray, seven-story stone building at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square; in tsarist times it housed the All-Russian Insurance Co. Behind the headquarters is the most celebrated KGB structure, Lubyanka Prison, through which tens of thousands of Soviet citizens have passed on their way to concentration camps or execution. These probably included three of Stalin's own secret police chiefs-Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria-who were shot following their fall from power. The KGB has administrative offices in every major center, and KGB officers occupy key posts...
...pervasive that most Soviets take it for granted that a stukach is always near by. At work, a factory laborer may be fired from his job for telling political jokes that an informer has repeated to the head of the personnel department, who is invariably working for the KGB. At home, an apartment dweller knows that his superintendent regularly reports on any unfamiliar visitors he may receive -especially overnight. Pressures on ordinary citizens to turn informer are great. Black marketeers and others arrested for petty crimes are offered freedom from prosecution in exchange for cooperation. Plainclothes KGB operatives take pains...
Backing up the stukachi network is a gigantic mail and telephone surveillance operation. A Soviet dissident now in exile once ran a test of the KGB's postal monitoring system by sending 100 letters to a West European town from various mailboxes in the U.S.S.R. Only six got through. Selective surveillance of mail and telephone calls has been made much easier in recent years by computers that enable the KGB to monitor specific targets...