The Cold War, Part II

[DingBat]

Well, the last one seemed to be popular, so let's try it again:

1) This U.S. ship was attacked by communist ships and Mig's, captured, and held for 11 months.

2) This ship, a CIA undertaking, was built for the express purpose of raising a Soviet Golf class ballistic missile submarine from the sea bottom.

3) Who were the Cambridge four?

4) Who was The Fifth Man?

5) The KH-11 satellite represented a major step for American intelligence as it was the first to provide real-time images. In what year was the first KH-11 launched?

6) This little Mossad espionage coup contributed to the 1956 Polish and Hungarian uprisings.

7) This agent provided information to Eisenhower and Kennedy about the true state of Soviet military preparedness until he was caught after meeting his British contact and executed.

8) The KGB got the last laugh on the CIA when it was discovered that they knew about this unique wiretapping operation from the very beginning.

9) Anyone who watches Sean Connery should know what SMERSH means.

10) This military base was much in the news during the Cold War, primarily as it was the first to receive the new ground launched cruise missiles.

Have fun,
/bruce

 

[Simon Darkshade]

Will put the rest in later tonight after food, but for now
9.) SMERSH = Soviet WWII security apparatus. Name derived from abreviation of motto "smert' shpionam" (Death to Spies)
7.) Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, GRU. Caught and fed into a furnace whilst still alive for treason. Film of this was used in GRU training to show the consequences of treason (at least according to Victor Suvorov)
10.) Greenham Common

 

[DingBat]

All good so far.

/bruce

 

[Simon Darkshade]

Right, try me hand on th'others:

1.) The USS Pueblo, captured by North Koreans in 1968

2.) The Glomar Explorer, to be built by a Howard Hughes company.

3.) British spies for the Soviet Union - Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. Philby, Maclean and Burgess defected to the Soviet Union, Blunt stayed on as a quiet art adviser to HRM the Queen.
Variously from MI5, MI6 and Foreign Office.

4.) John Cairncross.

5.) 1976

6.) Getting a copy of Khrushchev's speach repudiating Stalin?

8.) Stumped me.

Howzat?

 

[DingBat]

Excellent!

#6 especially was a tough one. Mossad acquired a copy of the speech, passed it to the CIA, which then broadcast it behind the Iron Curtain.

Good work.

Hint for #8: It occured in Berlin.

/bruce

 

[Simon Darkshade]

Ah! Berlin! Would that be the tunnel?

 

[DingBat]

Good work, Simon. All correct.

/bruce

 

[Case]

Originally posted by DingBat
1) This U.S. ship was attacked by communist ships and Mig's, captured, and held for 11 months.

Actually, the USS Pueblo is still held by the North Koreans. It's now tied up in Pyongyang and used for propaganda purposes

Incidently, the USS Pueblo is the only US Navy ship which was been captured since the war of 1812, and as the ship was captured by the enemy, it's never been formally taken off the US Navy's order of battle.

 

[Vrylakas]

I hate when I show up late for these things.

9) Anyone who watches Sean Connery should know what SMERSH means.

Smersh in Russian means "Death". It's about the same in all the Slavic languages. (Smierc in Polish.)

I'm not sure how it was used in the James Bond films - sorry - but SMERSH for Westerners (or more accurately, exiled Easterners) refers to the old NKVD Administration of Special Tasks, known by its euphemism mokrij djela ("wet matters"). This later evolved into the KGB's Department V, which carried out assassinations and murders abroad.

 

[DingBat]

SMERSH was used in a couple of the Bond films, the earlier ones I believe.

Vrylakas, didn't the KGB, at some point, "export" their wet work to the Bulgarians?

/bruce

 

[Vrylakas]

Dingbat wrote: SMERSH was used in a couple of the Bond films, the earlier ones I believe.

Vrylakas, didn't the KGB, at some point, "export" their wet work to the Bulgarians?

The KGB frequently "outsourced", both for reasons of deniability and sometimes because the satellite state secret services had unique or special connections. The large Polish and Czech communities in North America, the Bulgarian Turks, relatively mild Hungarian relations with the West; all were put to service for the KGB.

The Bulgarian communist service, Durjava Sigurnost', usually was only used to target specifically Bulgarian targets, most infamously the assassination of Georgi Markov by poison umbrella in 1978 London. (He had worked for the BBC's Bulgarian-language service and did broadcasts on Radio Free Europe.) It has not clearly been established that the Bulgarians were involved with the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II by Ahmet Ali Agca, though circumstantial evidence is strong.

In truth though, there wasn't much to distinguish between the communist secret services; all were brutal and criminal. In 1990 it was revealed that the SB, the Polish service, had spent most of the 1980s running a burglery racket in Western Europe (mostly France) stealing luxury items like cars and re-selling them, then sending the $$$ back to Poland. At a demonstration by taxi drivers once in Hungary in 1989, I was amazed to see the Hungarian service stand helplessly by and just watch menacingly - but not interfere. (Their day had long passed.)

Here's a thought: There are probably "sleepers" left over from all the communist services scattered all over Europe and North America, planted to one day rise up and wreak havoc should WW III break out but with the collapse of communism have been left to quietly fade into the background, like rusting shells in a Verdun field. In Poland I knew a man who had traveled in the West as a secret informant, and I always wonder when I meet older Poles here in the U.S. now whether they have a "clean" past. That's part of the fear and suspicion a communist country leaves you with.

On that paranoid note - Merry X-mas to all!

Good quiz DingBat - got another 'un?

 

[Kennelly]

Originally posted by DingBat


#6 especially was a tough one. Mossad acquired a copy of the speech, passed it to the CIA, which then broadcast it behind the Iron Curtain.

/bruce

It wasn´t only the Mossad,but mostly the German "Gehlen-Behörde",ancestor of the BND, which with Israeli help acquired the speech and gave it to the CIA to be published on 4th June 1956.