Word: kgb
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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John Le Carre's novels, in which secret agents confound one another with twisted espionage games, may have taken inspiration from legendary, real-life Soviet master-spy Alexander Feklisov, the cold-war operative who ran some of the KGB's deadliest spies in the West. Feklisov's recruits included Julius Rosenberg, widely believed to have provided information on the Manhattan Project, and German scientist Klaus Fuchs, who had worked at the Los Alamos lab. Feklisov was pivotal in his country's acquisition of the nuclear bomb, first exploded in 1949, some five years before U.S. agents expected...
Sometimes, the struggle against authority was literal. On Aug. 21, 1968, the day Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring, Rostropovich played with the U.S.S.R. State Symphony Orchestra in London. Watched by hovering KGB minders - "Sputniks," the musicians privately called them - he was greeted by shouts of protest. But his performance of the mournful, defiant concerto by the Czech composer Antonín Dvorák brought the hall to a comprehending silence. "As I played, I saw the dead in the Prague streets through my tears," he later said...
...threat of terrorism and extremism has not yet been eliminated," Nikolai Patrushev, Director of Russia's FSB (the KGB's heir), commented to Interfax wire agency. He has ordered his service to strengthen its control of Russia's sensitive installations. Patrushev said the train bomb was part of a pattern of violence that also included a spate of attacks on security forces and officials in the North Caucasus region around Chechnya...
...hotel recently garnered. It was in the nearby Millennium Hotel, last November, that Berezovsky's former employee Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian-born British citizen, drank tea contaminated with the radioactive isotope polonium-210, which killed him. British investigators identified as their prime suspect Andrei Lugovoi, like Litvinenko, a former kgb man. Moscow has turned down London's request for Lugovoi's extradition...
...Meanwhile, on the morning of January 7 this year, the rotor blades of a Russian Mi-8 helicopter shattered the divine silence at the opposite end of the Earth, disgorging a group of top Russian dignitaries led by none other than FSB (the former KGB) Director Nikolai Patrushev, to proudly raised the Russian flag over the South Pole. At the time, it might have looked like a stunt. But back in 2004, Patrushev landed at the North Pole in much the same fashion. Stay tuned...