ABSTRACT
The failure of the coup in August 1991, or rather the defeat of the putschists and the victory of Boris Yeltsin and other Russian democrats, provides my starting-point. These events brought to an end an enormous expansion of the KGB, the secret political police of the Soviet Union, which on the eve of the coup had under its command some 700,000 people in the Soviet Union including 12,000 intelligence officers. Something like between 1,500-2,000 of these officers were stationed abroad. At least 250 KGB officers were at work in Canada and the USA. This figure does not include the assets: the secret informers and KGB contacts in North America. To illustrate KGB deployments further: at least 700 KGB officers were posted in Germany, 100 in France, 100 in Italy and 150 in Austria; about 100 were stationed in India, 75 in Japan and so on. To this tally must be added the intelligence presence of the Soviet military, the GRU. Such was the scale of the Soviet espionage attack on the rest of the world.
