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> Two weeks ago South African police picked up Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, 47, and accused him of spying for the Soviet Union. The Berlin-born naval officer was apparently recruited by the KGB while training in Britain. Assigned to a naval base located on vital trade routes around the Cape of Good Hope, Gerhardt had access to secrets of international strategic importance.
One major development in KGB activity today is a growing interest in so-called LineX espionage, the theft of high-level technology (see box). Says former CIA Director Richard Helms: "Under Andropov, the Soviet Union has refined and expanded its intelligence targets. The new focus is on technology." Last October, officials of COCOM, the NATO committee overseeing East-West technology transfers, estimated that more than 20,000 Soviet and East bloc agents are now at work pilfering the latest Western gadgetry, and have whittled down the West's overall technological lead from ten years to about two. Prime American targets are the East Coast's high-tech corridor stretching from Boston to Baltimore, Southern California's aerospace industries, and the Silicon Valley, near San Francisco. The Soviet consulate in San Francisco has as many as 30 KGB and GRU agents, most of them scientific and technical experts.
The Kremlin can sometimes buy technology through intermediaries, "false flag operations." U.S. export restrictions prohibit the sale of sensitive equipment to the Warsaw Pact nations, but the Soviets have found willing channels abroad. West European businessmen will buy the desired hardware and export it to dummy European companies, which then reexport it to the Soviet Union. Austria and Switzerland, with relatively lax controls on imports, have become favored trading posts. Says an executive from one Silicon Valley company: "If every piece of equipment shipped to Vienna stayed there, the city would sink."
Much modern intelligence work is concerned not with military plans or industrial blueprints but with political information that can help the Kremlin zero in on targets of opportunity abroad. The Soviets may not be the initiators of global unrest, but they do their best to exploit it. KGB agents posted in the Third World alert Moscow to signs of political turmoil that could be fanned into "wars of national liberation." It is difficult to determine how critical a role KGB intelligence plays when the Politburo decides which rival political faction to back in a regional conflict. But it may have been because of such careful spadework that the Kremlin was able early on to examine Angola's struggle for independence and predict the winner, a nationalist group called the MPLA.
Once the Kremlin has determined what group can best serve its interests, KGB agents might be called on to provide paramilitary training or channel arms to the fledgling guerrillas. More often than not, however, such aid is provided by intermediaries. U.S. concern that the Soviet Union is intent on