Word: kgb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There, amid the taco joints and shopping malls, are hundreds of burgeoning high-tech firms that help give the U.S. its essential -- but fast shrinking -- edge over the Soviets in high-technology equipment. From their high-rent spy nest in San Francisco, KGB agents fan out through the valley, looking for Americans who can be bought and secrets that can be stolen...
...their masters to make high tech their No. 1 target. It is U.S. computer technology that the Soviets truly covet, for the ability to process masses of information in milliseconds is what makes modern weapons so deadly. Says FBI Counterintelligence Chief Ed O'Malley: "Science and technology is the KGB's largest growth industry...
From such public documents the Kremlin technocrats draw up shopping lists for the KGB and GRU, the chief intelligence directorate of the Soviet military. Last year, for instance, German officials uncovered a secret guide of high- tech items requested by the Kremlin. It was the size of a telephone book. KGB agents, like salesmen with a quota, were required to produce at least four items a year from the list...
...KGB has set up some 400 dummy corporations in Europe to buy high-tech exports. The Soviets can rely on dozens of unscrupulous Western technobandits eager to cash in on the Kremlin's 500% markups by acting as middlemen. So numerous and willing are the technobandits that the Soviets are able to get three or four bids for a single transaction. A valuable piece of high-tech gadgetry can sail a circuitous route before it "jumps the wall," in Customs agents' parlance, to the East bloc. Last month U.S. marshals arrested Marino Pradetto, 46, the Italian operator of a West...
...influence of Andropov, a former KGB chief who was Gorbachev's mentor, was particularly evident in the new leader's Politburo choices. First among them, in terms of seniority, was Viktor Chebrikov, 62, Andropov's handpicked successor as head of the KGB. Chebrikov was trained as a metallurgical engineer, then labored as a Communist Party functionary in Dnepropetrovsk before Andropov made him a KGB deputy chairman in 1968. Chebrikov is well chosen as a guardian of Communist conformity: in 1981 he railed against the "contamination of Soviet youth by Western ideas" and has since waged campaigns against "reactionary theological concepts...