Word: kgb
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...combination of opposites: ambition tempered with caution; forcefulness allied with compromise; a secretive, taciturn official persona paired with a reputation for gregariousness and wit in private. His obsessive secrecy about his personal life has allowed legends and rumors to embed themselves in his biography: that he was a career KGB officer; that his father's name was Finkelstein or Kirschenblatt; that his current family name is actually a pseudonym, taken to mask his Jewish roots. The stories are plausible but unprovable. The one man who could confirm or deny them, Primakov himself, refuses to comment. As a longtime colleague puts...
...involvement in the Middle East, as both a journalist and an academic, coincided with the nastiest period of the cold war in that part of the world--when the KGB, for example, was making weapons drops off the coast of Aden for radical Palestinian guerrillas. During this period, he developed close working relationships with some of the U.S.'s least favorite rulers, most notoriously with Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. According to widespread but unconfirmed reports, he worked for the KGB at this time. Primakov never comments on the allegations, though the fact that...
...ever found Primakov easy to take. Washington officials vividly remember how he showed up in Baghdad late in 1990 in an effort to rescue his friend Saddam Hussein and head off the Gulf War. Since then he has been head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, which succeeded the KGB. As Foreign Minister, he has done his best to prevent the expansion of NATO, lift the sanctions on Iraq and forestall Western military action against Serbia. Even so, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has gone out of her way to maintain a good working relationship with him. Last July...
Making Cold War was a formidable task, requiring a team of about 50 people who compiled 1,100 hours of archival film and conducted some 900 hours of interviews. The effort was rewarded in finds like footage of a rocket exploding on its launch site in Siberia. KGB film was obtained showing the arrest of CIA agents named by Aldrich Ames, and these are some of the most startling scenes in the series. Finding interview subjects was also arduous. Senior researcher Svetlana Palmer tracked down some people from old books that mentioned heroes of socialist labor. Then...
...which the action film has arrived. The title is the Japanese word for samurai who have lost their master and must hire themselves out as amoral and dispassionate mercenaries. The script, by J.D. Zeik and Richard Weisz (a pseudonym for David Mamet), applies the term to former CIA and KGB agents who are now obliged to work for terrorists and other international thugs, with no ideology to justify their exertions. It sets a bunch of them--including Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgard and Natascha McElhone, all enigmatic and excellent--in expensive, nonstop pursuit of an oddly shaped aluminum...