For Sale: Soviet Secrets

Why were several KGB agents skulking around the Frankfurt Book Fair recently? Like everybody else, they were looking for deals. The Soviet spymasters are conducting one of the most extraordinary auctions in history. To raise hard cash, they intend to sell large portions of their secret archives, according to the Nov. 4 issue of the weekly New York Observer. The files may contain answers to some of the most intriguing questions of the cold war era: How close did the U.S. and the Soviet Union come to war over Cuba? Were the Rosenbergs really Soviet spies? One problem will be to sort the real secrets from fabrications. Disinformation, after all, was a high art at the KGB.