The World: Spies: Foot Soldiers in an Endless War

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move, noting that Moscow's failure to reply to Douglas-Home's letters "suggests something more important than discourtesy. It indicates a cynical belief that we would meekly accept behavior which is outrageous."

Clicking Tongues

Not everybody agreed. Former Laborite Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart said the expulsions created too much of a "splash." Some critics complained that the Tories were trying to torpedo the projected European security conference, through which the Soviets hope to win Western recognition of the status quo in Eastern Europe. In fact, the British action appears to have been carefully timed to avoid damaging the conference. The British waited to move until after the four-power Berlin agreement was signed last month, and they acted well before the meeting, which is not likely to take place before mid-1972.

The Soviets responded with a campaign that mounted in intensity as the week wore on. As some of the expelled officials—who included nine of the embassy's eleven counselors and five of its twelve first secretaries—began crating furniture and canceling milk deliveries, the Kremlin launched a press campaign. Pravda accused London of "witch hunting" and declared that British intelligence uses British businessmen, tourists, journalists and scientists in the Soviet Union to carry out its "sinister aims." In Moscow, Kim Philby, the Briton who defected to the U.S.S.R. in 1963, named 20 British diplomats as agents for British intelligence, mainly in the Middle East.

Philby's office nowadays is located in KGB headquarters in the midst of Moscow, across Dzerzhinsky Square from a children's department store and round the corner from a huge book shop. No sign or flag indicates that it is the bastion of the Soviet secret police. In front of it stands the giant statue of the first Soviet secret policeman, Feliks E. Dzerzhinsky, who ran the police until his death in 1926. In the same building is dank Lubyanka prison, where political prisoners undergo their initial conditioning; in his novel The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote how its warders clicked their tongues to warn each other whenever they were escorting a prisoner: "One prisoner must never be allowed to encounter another, never be allowed to draw comfort or support from the look in his eyes."

The Soviet secret police, of course, have a dual function. At home they were never busier than during the Stalin era, when they organized and executed the purges and ran the labor camps. Today the KGB is headed by Yuri Andropov, 57, a Brezhnev Protégé who is clearly subordinate to the political arm of the party. A powerfully built man over 6 ft. tall, Andropov proved his ruthlessness in Hungary as ambassador at the time of the 1956 uprising. It was he who encouraged a delegation of Hungarians to meet with top Soviet officers in Budapest to talk about a withdrawal of Russian troops; two days later, when a settlement seemed near, General Ivan Serov, then head of the KGB, burst in on the parley with a platoon of agents and arrested the rebel leaders, many of whom were later executed. In 1967, Andropov became head of the KGB, and thereby master of the most formidable power complex in the Soviet Union outside the armed forces.

Even though the days of wholesale exile and mass

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