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"The really boring Russian diplomats are not KGB," says one Western intelligence agent. The KGB man often wears Western suits (veterans of U.S. service favor Brooks Brothers). He—or she—entertains freely, and spends more money than non-KGB apparatchiks.
Abroad, the most sociable KGB agents pose not only as diplomats but also as trade representatives and journalists. Their mission: gathering scientific and technical as well as military and political information. It is pursued directly by inviting employees, journalists and politicians to lunch or parties, and also by covert means.
In the field, KGB agents prepare annual plans that project, among other things, the number of collaborators they will recruit in the coming year; their performance is judged against the plan. Blackmail is a favorite recruitment tactic, with sex and drugs the standard come-ons, but sometimes other pressure is applied as well. Last month Iranian Major General Ahmed Mogharebi confessed that he had spied for the KGB after Soviet agents threatened to reveal his past membership in Iran's outlawed Communist Party, Tudeh. The leader of the Iranian spy ring, a government official named Ali-Naghi Rabbani, had sophisticated radio equipment for receiving Soviet satellite transmissions in his home. Rabbani's clandestine contact was the Soviet consul in Tehran, Boris Kabanov, who was expelled from the country. Both Mogharebi and Rabbani were sentenced to death; late last month Mogharebi was executed by a firing squad.
In the Soviet Union, the KGB attempts on occasion to entrap foreign diplomats and journalists, especially ones it wishes to expel. When he was working for U.P.I., Christopher Ogden, now a TIME correspondent, was invited to a mysterious street-corner meeting in Moscow in 1973. He was offered the "secret plans" for a Soviet troop crossing into China.
He declined them.
Because most of the KGB's effort is aimed at free and open Western societies, KGB tacticians stress the use of agents on the ground, instead of electronic intelligence gathering, at which the U.S. is stronger. The KGB excels at recruiting new agents: with only some exaggeration, a West German intelligence expert says, "There is not one place in the world where the KGB does not have its man." Indeed, Superspy Colonel Rudolf Abel, apprehended in New York in 1957, was found to command a vast net work of agents that ranged over the entire North American continent. Today the KGB cooperates closely with the East German Ministry for Security, which in 1972 successfully planted an agent, Günter Guillaume, as a close aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Guillaume spirited NATO defense and other secrets out of West Germany until his arrest in 1974. Last year French counterintelligence (the DST) broke up a spy ring that gave the Soviets information about the advanced Mirage-2000 fighter plane and NATO defenses. Israeli officials were shocked in 1972 when they deciphered the code used for radio transmissions between Cyprus, the KGB's Middle East headquarters, and Moscow, and discovered the Soviets had obtained full details of a planned Israeli retaliation raid against Syria. Damascus had the plan four hours before the scheduled Israeli raid.