Word: kgb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soviet KGB is one of the most ruthless organizations on earth. Its functions are comparable to most of those belonging to the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service and parts of the departments of Justice and Defense. To control a population it can no longer inspire, the Kremlin relies upon security police and informers. To obtain military secrets and advanced technology it cannot develop efficiently at home, it employs espionage abroad. To subvert governments it cannot persuade through normal interaction, the U.S.S.R. has fielded a secret army--of mercenaries as well as Soviets--to advance its international goals...
...global scale of KGB operations is larger than the intelligence activities of all the West combined. Besides more than 100,000 professionals, the KGB has a specially trained elite army of roughly 500,000 equipped with the latest weapons, tanks and artillery. They guard frontiers, the Kremlin and other major government installations. They include highly developed sabotage units and special-purpose forces. The latter were used extensively to crush resistance to Soviet domination over Eastern Europe...
...recounts how, finally fed up with the Soviet system despite his privileged place in it, he seeks and is promised asylum in the U.S.--but only after he agrees to become "a reluctant spy." For the next 2 1/2 years he lives in constant fear of discovery by the KGB and in constant guilt about the family he might have to leave behind. In 1978 he finally comes in from the cold, but with anguishing results...
Soviet officials have also begun to murmur the name of the "vacation spot" where Chernenko may be staying. It is the so-called Kremlin Hospital, a heavily guarded facility seven miles northwest of the Kremlin in an exclusive, wooded suburban area known as Kuntsevo. Traffic police who may be KGB men are stationed every quarter-mile along the two-lane road that leads to the heavily guarded hospital, which is nestled among silver birch and oak trees and surrounded by an unpainted, 10-ft.-high cement wall...
...perhaps as few as five or six, and usually only those based in Moscow, normally control the process. Says a Kremlinologist at the U.S. State Department: "There are no votes taken. They palaver until the consensus is reached." In the final hours of the decision, the military and the KGB may become more influential, as they < were in helping to swing the balance in favor of Andropov. There is no guarantee, however, that next time they will have anything like the same significance...