The Soviet secret service is getting bigger—and better
Panama City, Fla., 1971: Carrying a hefty attaché case, U.S. Air Force Sergeant Walter T. Perkins walks to a commercial jet destined for Mexico City, where he plans to rendezvous with an agent of the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service. In the attaché case are top-secret U.S. plans for defense against a Soviet air attack. Air Force security men arrest Perkins as he boards, and his KGB contact, Oleg Shevchenko, flees Mexico for Cuba.
Damascus, Syria, 1974: Hidden KGB cameras click softly, and a secret microphone records the tender dialogue as an Arab diplomat dallies with a male paramour in the city's infamous Turkish baths. Threatened afterward with disclosure of his homosexuality, the diplomat agrees to pass information to the KGB.
Jerusalem, 1976: The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church makes his pilgrimage from Moscow to the Russian Orthodox Church in Israel, the sole building in that country allowed to remain in Soviet hands after Israel's 1967 break with the U.S.S.R. Accompanying the Patriarch on his mission, as usual, is a squad of KGB agents bearing communications equipment and funds for local agents. Vladimir Ribakov, the administrative manager of the church in Jerusalem, is the KGB's chief agent in Israel.
These are only a few of the thousands of known incidents that shed a sliver of light on the sweep of Soviet intelligence activities round the world. Western authorities view the KGB as a worthy and persistent foe. Says a former high CIA and State Department official: "They're a lot better than we think: I think they're damn good."
The KGB'S budget has grown to an estimated $10 billion (v. the $7 billion that the U.S. spends on the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies), and its roster, which approaches half a million employees, has grown dramatically since 1974. Western experts believe it has five times as many people involved in foreign intelligence as the CIA and Western European spy agencies combined.
A major European intelligence service claims 24% of the Soviet diplomats accredited to embassies in Western Europe are KGB agents; there are 87 such agents accredited in West Germany, 53 in Italy and 98 in Finland. About 35% of the 136 diplomats accredited to the Soviet embassy in Washington are believed to be KGB agents, and others serve as Tass correspondents, trade representatives and employees of the Soviet airline Aeroflot.