Comrade Charlie Read Free Page A

Washington DC is a porous place where rumours, even over something so sensitive, are balanced for their political advantage. After so many concessions from a Moscow and a Soviet hierarchy different from any they had known or dealt with before, the State Department saw no harm in the smallest of leaks, hopefully to influence the continuing Conventional Arms Limitation discussions in Geneva.
    That most influential of aeronautical magazines, Aviation Weekly , was the first to publish an indication of the Star Wars decision, quickly followed by other monitoring publications and other monitoring commentators.
    It was also monitored in Moscow, which was the State Department intention, although not at all in the way that they had expected.

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    No established order of Soviet society has suffered a greater upheaval by the ascent to power of Mikhail Gorbachev than the KGB, which is the most established of all orders of Soviet society. From the moment of its inception, within a month of the 1917 revolution, the Russian intelligence apparatus, through all its name changes, developed into the essential core of government yet insularly aloof from it. An elaborate spider’s web of internal directorates and sections and departments, each enveloping strand interlocking with another enveloping strand to control the Soviet people, was spun to maintain the power of successive leaders and their Politburo. And those leaders were always made gratefully aware of the fact. In 1953 Nikita Krushchev – the man later responsible for its last name change to the KGB – successfully challenged the autonomy of the organization by defeating the bid of its then chairman, Lavrenti Beria, to succeed Stalin. Krushchev’s mistake was introducing at the same time the edict that the Politburo approve every major international espionage activity before its commencement.
    The KGB has always been chameleon-like in its ability to adjust its appearance to merge into its current surroundings. For a while, even after Krushchev’s demise, the system of control appeared to operate, although those within the organization continued as they had since 1917, a people apart from other Russian people, with access to concessions and luxuries and privilege, untouched by the perpetual shortages and deprivations suffered by the rest. The adjustment to circumstances and surroundings took place at the very top: if the KGB had instinctively to know the attitudes of the Politburo, ran the persuasion, then its chairmen needed to be members of that ultimate controlling, policy-forming body. So the successive appointments were made, which put the KGB where it always sought to be, at the absolute heart and mind of things. Making the organization, in fact, stronger and more powerful than it had ever been before.
    Then came Mikhail Gorbachev. And glasnost . And perestroika . And after freedom and openness came the most unimaginable change of all. The KGB was demoted, by every definition of the word. Chairman Viktor Chebrikov was transferred to another ministry and his successor, Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkev, was denied that all-important elevation to the ruling Politburo. The republics of Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania were allowed publicly to vote against Moscow’s central control and thousands paraded in the streets in support of autonomy. Yet bigger demonstrations were permitted – and even more incredibly, seen on Soviet television to be permitted! – between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
    The chameleon changes colour when it’s frightened but this time the frightened KGB didn’t know which hue to adopt: internal and external directorates and divisions instead scuttled around in disarray, seeking concealment and disguise.
    There were two KGB executives, intimate friends yet pragmatic even in friendship, for whom the American Star Wars revelations destroyed any chance of the hoped-for, regroup-and-think concealment. One was General Valeri Kalenin, a