Wednesday, May 19, 2004
KGB: the sequel
An interesting symposium chaired by Jamie Glazov of FrontPage magazine on "KGB Resurrection". Participating: Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former Romanian spy chief and the most senior intelligence defector to the West (as it happens, I'm reading his memoirs "Red Horizons" right now); James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA; and Vladimir Bukovsky, the famous Soviet-era dissident.
I have to say that my only personal brush with communist state security involved a fat cop telling me and my primary school friends to take our snowball fight somewhere else (we were about 50 yards away from the Communist Party HQ in Krakow and our behaviour was obviously deemed a threat to the state). The Soviet consulate was only another 100 yards in the opposite direction, and during the martial law (1981-3), the nearby tourist hostel had been taken over by the riot police and paramilitary security units as their base of operations in Krakow. So you can say I've had a pretty safe and secure walk to school every day (the school - by the way - was very imaginatively named, to the never-ending amusement of my Australian friends, Primary School Number 1. And no, Pol "Brother Number One" Pot was not an alumni).
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I have to say that my only personal brush with communist state security involved a fat cop telling me and my primary school friends to take our snowball fight somewhere else (we were about 50 yards away from the Communist Party HQ in Krakow and our behaviour was obviously deemed a threat to the state). The Soviet consulate was only another 100 yards in the opposite direction, and during the martial law (1981-3), the nearby tourist hostel had been taken over by the riot police and paramilitary security units as their base of operations in Krakow. So you can say I've had a pretty safe and secure walk to school every day (the school - by the way - was very imaginatively named, to the never-ending amusement of my Australian friends, Primary School Number 1. And no, Pol "Brother Number One" Pot was not an alumni).
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