The World: Spies: Foot Soldiers in an Endless War

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Ambler, author of spy mysteries, has little use for the new species of spy, particularly the representatives of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti (KGB), the Soviet Committee for State Security, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. "KGB men?" he sneers. "They're the potato-faced fellows you see on trains in Eastern Europe wearing suits that aren't quite right and smelling too much of eau de cologne. The CIA people all smell like aftershave lotion. They always look as if they are on their way to some boring sales conference for an unexciting product—and in a way, they are."

In one respect, Ambler is unfair and behind the times. The contemporary KGB man is generally far more polished, more sophisticated, more accomplished in foreign languages and manners than his counterpart of a few years ago. But Ambler is right in saying that the Mata Haris and the 007s have largely given way to the undramatic, plodding and featureless agents who count it a job well done if they wheedle a photostat of a set of circuits out of a computer repairman for $80.

Wide-Open Country

The heroes, if there are any at all, sit behind gray desks in Moscow: Langley, Va.; and London, There they must sift through tons of material provided by hundreds of different sources before they can, with luck, piece together a picture of, say, the locking mechanism on a swing-wing fighter. Many of the reports are useless, some are contradictory and others are deliberately misleading, planted by departments of "disinformation."

It is work that occupies tens of thousands of mathematicians and cryptographers, clerks and military analysts, often with the most trivial-seeming tasks. Yet it is work that no major nation feels it can afford to halt. Says a former British ambassador: "We all spy, of course, more or less. But the Russians are rather busier at it than most. They're more basic too: not so subtle as our chaps. I like to think that we have a certain finesse in our methods —that we don't go at the thing bullheaded. But maybe our tasks are different from theirs, just because this country is so wide open."

Wide open or not, there remains the question, in Eric Ambler's words: "What on earth has the KGB got to spy on in Britain? You would think 105 spies could cover the whole of America." However, as a top Whitehall official told an American last week: "I rather think the Russians look upon London as a good place to collect information about you." Agreed an equally high functionary in Washington: "The Russians know full well that the one country with which the U.S. shares more information than any other is Britain. They know Britain is the only country with which we share nuclear secrets."

Ladies' Man

Oleg Lyalin and his colleagues would have been delighted to steal such secrets. Most of their work was more mundane, however, although some of it struck deeply enough at the security of NATO. Among the papers Lyalin delivered to British intelligence were contingency plans for sabotaging Britain's early-warning systems for detecting approaching missiles, presumably including the huge new U.S.-built installation at Orford Ness.

For almost a week after the case broke, Lyalin's identity remained a secret. Finally, when two Daily