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On arrival, he was dismayed to learn that something had gone wrong; the box containing the missile had been off-loaded in Copenhagen by mistake and sent back to Düsseldorf. When the box finally arrived in Moscow after a ten-day delay, the Soviets could hardly believe their eyes. "Brüderchen [Little Brother]," roared Ramminger's contact in the KGB, shaking with laughter, "You're a superman!"
Not all KGB exploits are so successful. There was, for example, the case last March involving Mexican students sent through Moscow to North Korea for guerrilla training. But the war goes on in every part of the globe. Items:
>In September 1969, KGB agents in Beirut tried to steal a French-built Mirage 111-E fighter from the Lebanese air force to test against Soviet MIGs. They offered a young Lebanese fighter pilot $2,000,000 to fly his plane to Baku in the Soviet Union. The officer reported the offer to his superiors, and the two Russians, caught red-handed with a $200,000 down-payment check, were wounded in a shootout with Lebanese police and were quickly deported.
> Even though they suspected Communist agents of stirring up university students to oppose the regime, Congolese officials agreed early this year to permit a 15-man Soviet football team to visit the country. A few days after the team ended its tour, however, the Kinshasa government discovered that only eleven players had departed; the remaining four, quietly at work in the Soviet embassy, were subsequently expelled.
> In Japan, the Soviets' chief interest is the U.S. military hardware. A month ago, police arrested Kazuo Kobayashi, 41, after catching him trying to buy the plans for a Phantom-fighter missile and radar systems from an American G.I. for $555. Then, with Kobayashi's help, they confronted his contact, who had identified himself only as "Ed" but proved to be Lieut. Colonel Lev Konokov, assistant military and air attache at the Soviet embassy in Tokyo.
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Most of the world's governments are becoming increasingly bureaucratic and secretive. A case in point is the Pentagon's passion for classifying every document in sight. If those SECRET stamps were used less frequently, spies would be a lot less busy trying to grab often totally unimportant material.
The Soviets, moreover, are inclined to accord greater respect to information that has been acquired deviously—even if it is as accessible as a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. In The First Circle, Novelist Solzhenitsyn scathingly described a prison research institute run by Soviet intelligence where American magazines that were sold to anyone in the U.S. "were here numbered, bound with string, classified and sealed up in fireproof safes, out of reach of American spies." The result, for the CIA as well as the KGB, is an astonishing amount of make-work and the accumulation of vast amounts of material that simply cannot be digested—even with computers reminiscent of Len Deighton's The Billion Dollar Brain constantly whirring.
Is it all necessary? During his 1959 visit to the U.S. Khrushchev told Allen Dulles, then director of the CIA: "We should buy our intelligence