Word: tass
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gennadi Varenik was a KGB major working in Bonn under cover as a correspondent for TASS, the Soviet news agency, when he was suddenly recalled to Moscow in November 1985. Four months earlier, Aldrich Ames had told the Soviets that Varenik was spying for the cia. He was charged with that crime, tried and executed. This was a murderous tragedy, mentioned briefly in David Wise's book. It also represented a significant setback for the U.S. TIME's investigation of the Varenik case over the past three months reveals that he was one of the most promising KGB double agents...
Varenik was a KGB brat--the son of a KGB colonel--and a graduate of the Andropov Red Banner Institute, which trains intelligence agents. He spent a year working at the TASS offices in Moscow preparing for his cover job. His first contact with the cia came a year after his arrival in Germany in 1981. A colleague introduced him to a CIA officer, and for more than a year, each believed he was cultivating the other as a possible double agent. Varenik abruptly broke off discussions in 1983, but the cia had passed him a secret telephone number...
...ensuing months, Varenik talked with CIA agents at hotels and later at a CIA safe house. If he wanted to meet, he would make a chalk mark on a utility pole that was on his route home from the TASS office. The CIA paid him $3,000 a month. He also received small gifts-a German encyclopedia, for example. He was prolific: his reports fill four drawers in a CIA safe. He described "false flag" operations in which KGB agents recruited Germans while pretending to be South Africans or Israelis...
...missile fired from a Russian Su-25 attack jet on a testing range went off course and narrowly missed an apartment complex and a nuclear power plant, the ITAR-Tass news agency said today. The missile, launched on Friday from Voronezh, about 350 miles south of Moscow, reportedly landed just 2.7 miles from the Novovoronezhskaya power station and only 660 feet from the apartment buildings, injuring one man. Regional Gov. Alexander Kovalyov complained on national television that he has repeatedly asked for the range to be moved. Last Friday's TIME Daily MONEY
...converged on the Chechen capital of Grozny but were holding off on a final assault. Yeltsin extended for 48 hours, until Saturday midnight, an ultimatum for Chechens to surrender their weapons. His first ultimatum was a flat failure; as it was about to expire Thursday, the Moscow news agency TASS reported that "not a single gun has been turned in." On Saturday, Moscow issued a harsher threat: missile strikes against strategic targets in Grozny if the Chechens did not disarm. The rebels refused to blink. Said a spokesman: "When the bombing starts, we will first go to our shelters. When...