Word: luxembourg
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Every Wednesday morning, Aeroflot flight 233 from Moscow touches down at Luxembourg International Airport. The 80-passenger Tupolev jet usually disgorges a curiously small contingent of passengers-rarely more than 15-from the Soviet capital. A few hours later, perhaps another ten or 15 passengers will embark for the flight back to Moscow, frequently taking with them enormous quantities of inspection-free diplomatic baggage. Their comings and goings excite little attention, except for the scrutiny of two Western intelligence agents assigned to watch each arriving and departing face. Reason: the Aeroflot flights to and from Luxembourg...
Even without the weekly batch of transients, the Russian presence in Luxembourg is about as subtle as an elephant at a garden party. Ambassador Yevgeni Kosarev, a dour commissar-type who bores his fellow diplomats at cocktail parties by talking endlessly about grain crops, supervises an embassy of 36 Soviet officials-roughly one for every 10,000 Luxembourgers...
Improving Relations. The Soviet delegation is housed in a Draculesque castle on a forest-trimmed hilltop three miles north of Luxembourg City; the mission is protected by two stone walls equipped with television and other electronic surveillance devices. The embassy's first secretary and press officer, Anatoli Meshcheriakov, lamely justifies the mission's size on the ground that his government is interested in improving relations with Luxembourg...
...officials are members of either the KGB, the Soviet secret police, or the GRU, the Soviet military's intelligence section. Meshcheriakov himself is said to be the KGB station chief; the cultural attache, one Lev Gaganov, station chief for the GRU. Moreover, the weekly Aeroflot flights to Luxembourg, which began last July, were negotiated by a KGB operative who was expelled from France three years ago for industrial espionage...
Soviet interest in Luxembourg is easily explained. Although not exactly a military power-its army numbers all of 500, including a 100-member band-the grand duchy belongs to NATO, and its officials are privy to many Western military secrets. The country is a wide-open highway into Belgium, France and West Germany-less than an hour's drive from U.S. bases in Germany and only two hours from NATO headquarters in Brussels. Most of Luxembourg's borders are untended even by customs officials, and its pine forests offer thousands of safe passageways to anyone who wants...