2RHPZ
05-28-2005, 03:11 AM
New Evidence on Soviet Foreign Intelligence
January 15, 2005
It would be interesting to know to what extent these tasks were put into practice, especially the third one about abducting individuals from abroad, but the authors do not go into this. As far as is known, during the Cold War abductions from the West by the KGB were largely limited to Soviet defectors and anticommunist Russian exiles, the case of the former Soviet naval officer Nikolay Artamonov (Shadrin) being a good example. Artamonov had defected to the US in 1959 and died in the course of an abduction attempt by the KGB along the Austrian-Czech border in 1975. It is therefore unclear what the practical meaning was of this aspect of this particular Soviet intelligence doctrine, if the version of Kolpakidi and Prokhorov is correct.
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This book sometimes shows strange and inexplicable omissions. For instance, the entries on Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt are fairly extensive and both cover more than one page, but don’t mention the fact that both men were homosexuals, which especially in the case of Burgess is an inexcusable omission as this relates to a prominent aspect of his personality. The same omission is present in the entry of the well-known KGB agent in the British Admiralty John Vassall who was recruited in Moscow in 1955 in a KGB operation that made use of his homosexual inclinations. The explanation for such omissions which comes to mind is that they are a remnant of old fashioned Soviet prudishness, which was of course very pervasive at the time of the former USSR, when publications very rarely even mentioned such matters as homosexuality. A serious shortcoming as well, which is unfortunately to be found in many works on intelligence history in Russia these days, is the absence of an index of names, which limits the usefulness of the book in many ways, for obvious reasons.
http://wwics.si.edu/topics/images/header_cwihp.gif (http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.item&news_id=105150)
January 15, 2005
It would be interesting to know to what extent these tasks were put into practice, especially the third one about abducting individuals from abroad, but the authors do not go into this. As far as is known, during the Cold War abductions from the West by the KGB were largely limited to Soviet defectors and anticommunist Russian exiles, the case of the former Soviet naval officer Nikolay Artamonov (Shadrin) being a good example. Artamonov had defected to the US in 1959 and died in the course of an abduction attempt by the KGB along the Austrian-Czech border in 1975. It is therefore unclear what the practical meaning was of this aspect of this particular Soviet intelligence doctrine, if the version of Kolpakidi and Prokhorov is correct.
.................................
This book sometimes shows strange and inexplicable omissions. For instance, the entries on Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt are fairly extensive and both cover more than one page, but don’t mention the fact that both men were homosexuals, which especially in the case of Burgess is an inexcusable omission as this relates to a prominent aspect of his personality. The same omission is present in the entry of the well-known KGB agent in the British Admiralty John Vassall who was recruited in Moscow in 1955 in a KGB operation that made use of his homosexual inclinations. The explanation for such omissions which comes to mind is that they are a remnant of old fashioned Soviet prudishness, which was of course very pervasive at the time of the former USSR, when publications very rarely even mentioned such matters as homosexuality. A serious shortcoming as well, which is unfortunately to be found in many works on intelligence history in Russia these days, is the absence of an index of names, which limits the usefulness of the book in many ways, for obvious reasons.
http://wwics.si.edu/topics/images/header_cwihp.gif (http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.item&news_id=105150)