Word: sovietizers
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...impeccable, for in the U.S., foreign films were at last starting to make a bold impression on the domestic culture. Up to the mid-'40s, foreign films were a cottage industry. Art houses, small theaters in large cities, could be counted in the dozens. They showed French and Soviet films to the cinerati. But there were also many theaters for first- and second-generation immigrants homesick for the kinds of movies they left back in the old country. Hence the foreign-language pictures, typically without subtitles, in German, Greek and Italian neighborhoods...
...Without A Face" - for many years, Western spy agencies did not even have a photo of him - Wolf was the son of a German Jewish doctor and playwright, a Communist who had to flee Hitler and ended up in Moscow. He attended elite party schools in the Soviet Union, was trained for undercover work, returned to Germany as a journalist covering the Nuremburg trials and joined the East Germany spy service at its inception. In 1952, because his pungent Stalinism convinced Russian leaders of his loyalty, he became its chief - and brilliant...
...Wolf also turned many Western German spies into double agents. One, code-named "Topaz," worked for more than two decades in NATO's headquarters. Wolf personally ran the highest-ranking woman in the West German intelligence service, the deputy head of its Soviet bloc division, whose reports were so good they regularly reached the desks of the head of the KGB in Moscow. Even the head of West German counterintelligence defected to Wolf. "As even my bitter foes would acknowledge," he wrote in his interesting but fundamentally unrevealing 1997 memoir The Man Without A Face, his spy agency "was probably...
...Finally, unlike the Rumsfeld Pentagon, the Gates Pentagon will deal in fact. Gates knows good intelligence from bad. Think tanks, intelligence contractors and data miners might want to start looking for other clients. Still, one of the accusations that will be leveled at Gates is that he exaggerated the Soviet threat during the Reagan Administration. He cooked the books so Reagan could justify a bigger defense budget, or so it is said. This will be a hard one to prove. Soviet assessments were always an imprecise art. Anyhow, it was the entire CIA that missed the collapse of the Soviet...
...election of Ortega - who won with 38% of the vote, about 8 points ahead of his U.S.-backed opponent, conservative banker Eduardo Montealegre - is no doubt a concern. After he and Sandinista guerrillas toppled Nicaragua's brutal dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in 1979, Ortega led an authoritarian, Soviet-backed regime that wrecked the economy and fought a civil war with U.S.-backed contra rebels that killed some 50,000 people. Ortega was finally ousted in a 1990 election, and for the past 16 years, during which he twice failed to recapture the presidency, he seemed little more than a relic...