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Party Congress well in advance of U.S. intelligence; and knowing the location of every plane in the Egyptian air force and where nearly every pilot would be (at breakfast) when the Six-Day War was launched in 1967.
Stolen Sidewinder
Both the CIA and the KGB have had their share of successes and disasters. The CIA prides itself on the Penkovsky case, which exposed the operation—and many of the personnel—of the .Soviet military intelligence network. In 1967, the CIA managed the skillful extrication from Moscow of KGB Colonel Evgeny Runge, who had led a spy network in West Germany. Until the Francis Gary Powers case, the U-2 operation was a major intelligence success. The CIA is also credited with obtaining superior information about Soviet military developments and Chinese nuclear-weapons progress, and with sound assessments of the situation in Viet Nam (which were frequently ignored 6y policymakers). Among its setbacks: the Bay of Pigs, although this was a failure of decision making as well as intelligence, and the failure to warn of the Berlin Wall's construction in 1961 or Khruschchev's fall from power in 1964. In some cases, the agency was plagued by the ever-present problem of drawing the line between operations and intelligence; the line became unrecognizably blurred in places like Laos and Guatemala.
One of the KGB's most notable successes was the Burgess-MacLean-Philby case, a classic example of successful infiltration aided by the refusal of the British Foreign Office's "old boys" to admit that one of their class could betray the country. Colonel Rudolf Abel spent nine years in the U.S. running a spy network that may have covered all of
North America. In Bonn, Freelance Photographer Heinz Sütterlin wooed and won the plump secretary of a high Foreign Ministry official and sent nearly 1,000 secret papers to Moscow before a defector blew his cover and prompted the ill-used Mrs. Sütterlin to commit suicide. Heinz Felfe, who held a key position in the BND, the West German equivalent of the CIA, for ten years was a double agent who supplied the Soviets with the names of West German agents in the East, codes, dead-letter drops and courier routes. He all but wiped out BND operations in the Soviet orbit. To keep him above suspicion, Moscow regularly gave him important secrets concerning East Germany to feed to his unsuspecting West German employers; he was so valuable that the KGB even allowed him to betray a lesser Soviet spy to Bonn.
Perhaps the weirdest case in the KGB's history—and one of its dizziest triumphs—occurred in 1967, when three men stole a Sidewinder missile from a supposedly well-guarded NATO base at Zell and drove 300 miles along the autobahn to Krefeld with the 9½-ft. rocket sticking out a window. When their leader, Manfred Ramminger, inquired at the Düsseldorf airport about the best way to get a shipment to Moscow, KLM suggested air freight and Lufthansa assured him that nobody at the German customs office would bother about the contents.