Word: kgb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Secret emperors, the men of the KGB exercise preventive supervision of the population and its loyalty. The KGB could not halt the alienation that grew as Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's expansive promises of well-being went unfulfilled. But the "GehBeh," as the organization is nicknamed after its initials, can report what is happening to the leadership. The more disquieting evidence it produces, the more the KGB justifies its insistence on larger budgets and greater manpower. Since there really has been trouble--a food riot in Novocherkassk in 1962, for instance--the leadership has acquiesced to the KGB's demands...
Even the top men are constrained by the KGB. The Vertushka, the Kremlin telephone system, is installed, maintained and monitored by the secret police. Their agents serve as bodyguards, chauffeurs, cooks, valets and maids to Politburo members, guaranteeing not only security but surveillance...
Most sinister of the secret-police operatives are the shadowy assassins and terrorists whose specialty is mokrie dela (wet affairs), from the so-called Department V, the KGB's Executive Action Department. I had naively assumed that political murders, kidnapings, sabotage targeted against Western civilian sectors had been pretty much abandoned by the U.S.S.R. by the mid-1950s, after the Stalin-Beria era. I was wrong. I met some of those operatives when I first lived in New York as a junior diplomat...
...towers," he said, gesturing at the Manhattan skyline, "they look so strong, so tall, but they're just a house of cards. A few explosions in the right places and do svidaniya (goodbye). We're only beginning to realize how vulnerable this country really is." No one commented. Even KGB personnel feared...
...other KGB agents were often seen with "medical advisers" at the mission. Their jobs were to acquire as much information as possible about American medicine. Some were epidemiologists. The agent who was later expelled had spoken with relish about the possibility of demolishing New York's electric-power systems. Perhaps he was working out plans of an even more sinister nature with the poison and plague specialists...