KGB Today [antikvár]

Author's Preface Anyone who writes about secret subjects and asks to be taken seriously is obligated to explain the origin, methods and purpose of his or her work, and above all to cite sources. This book had its beginnings on a gloomy, rainy evening in November 1979, when Major Stanislav Aleksandrovich Lev-chenko came to my home. Not many days before, Levchenko had escaped to the United States from Tokyo where for nearly five years he had been at the core of great KGB operations.* He was still experiencing the traumas of flight, of the loss of his family, of permanent severance from his culture, and of entry into an alien society he had been taught to despise. Yet, from the outset, Levchenko behaved as an officer and gentleman, a Russian patriot, who, though he had come to hate the KGB and the Soviet system, still revered his native Russia *The letters KGB stand for the Russian words Komitet Gosudarstven-noy Bezopasnosti, which mean Committee for State Security. The KGB is an apparatus that functions as a secret political police force within the Soviet Union, and abroad as an instrument of clandestine action. Founded December 20, 1917, as the Cheka, the apparatus has undergone numerous titular changes, being known successively as the GPU, OGPU, GUGB, NKVD, NKGB, MGB and, since March 13, 1954, the KGB. Always it has been the "Sword and Shield of the Party"—the shield which protects the Soviet Communist Party oligarchy, the sword by which the oligarchy attempts to impose its will within and without the Soviet Union. 7