Word: kgb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany. When members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army went on a hunger strike in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison in the spring of 1981, for example, British intelligence agents noticed that senior KGB officials held a number of meetings with Provo leaders in Dublin. Says a top Western intelligence expert: "The Soviets back groups and people who are certifiably terrorist, but they do it with their fingers crossed and with their hands over their ears, if not their eyes. Backing a terrorist...
...Andropov well knew, there is nothing at all similar about the position Bush held for a year and the powers that the Soviet leader wielded for 15 years as chief of the world's largest spy and state-security machine. From an office in the KGB's ocher-colored neo-Renaissance headquarters at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square,* barely a mile from the Kremlin, the head of the KGB oversees an intricate network of espionage and information-gathering operations that further the political objectives of the Communist Party. Unlike the CIA, the KGB works both abroad and at home, doing...
Outside the Soviet Union, the KGB seems to embody Western fear and loathing of the Soviet system. Almost from its inception as an instrument of "revolutionary justice" following the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet secret police, known successively as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB and, since 1954, the KGB, has been synonymous with terror and coercion. It brings to mind the worst excesses of the Stalinist period: the public show trials and confessions exacted through torture, the random arrests and midnight executions in the infamous Lubyanka prison. KGB "sleepers" penetrating to the heart of Western intelligence services...
During Andropov's tenure at Dzerzhinsky Square, the KGB stepped up efforts to influence world events in the Soviet Union's favor through propaganda and disinformation, so-called active measures. Some of the KGB's more polished agents abroad have apparently been instructed in recent years to cultivate officials of their host governments and drop tantalizingly frank tidbits of information during cocktail-party chatter. Says former West German Counterespionage Officer Hans Josef Horchem: "They come right up to a man, knowing that he knows they are KGB, and with a wink of the eye, they calmly ask him about exactly...
...question of Soviet influence becomes difficult to call when counterespionage officials try to uncover KGB links to the antinuclear movement in the U.S. and Western Europe. By CIA reckoning, the Soviets spend roughly $3 billion to $4 billion each year on overt and covert propaganda activities. According to a State Department official, as much as $600 million may have been spent so far on the peace offensive. Using national Communist parties or recognized Communist-front organizations like the World Peace Council, the Kremlin has been able to channel funds to a host of new antiwar organizations that would, in many...