ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most significant international event of the last decade has been the end of the 'cold war' which, since 1947, had been the primary factor in determining the foreign policies of the Western industrialised states. It also had a profound effect on the domestic politics of these nations, leading to, among other things, the vetting of recruits to state employment, the surveillance of dissenting political movements and strenuous efforts by governments to minimise access to state information. The collapse of the regimes of Eastern Europe was nowhere more spectacular than among their own security agencies, for example the ransacking of the offices of the Stasi in the former German Democratic Republic in January 1990. In the Soviet Union the KGB had embarked upon a process of giasnost, through giving interviews to the Western media, until its involvement in the coup attempt of August 1991 led to its break-up into smaller agencies within the republics into which the Soviet Union divided.
