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The San Bernardino County Sun from San Bernardino, California • Page 88

Location:
San Bernardino, California
Issue Date:
Page:
88
Extracted Article Text (OCR)

GRU continued ULil) mmm mml' r-a oday, much of Soviet military commercial, academic in the guise of United Nations employees and as "illegals" who are given a spurious identity in a Western country. The Soviet airline. Aeroflot, is a favored vehicle for GRU spies and functions as a GRU proprietary. According to Vadim, a GRU lieutenant-general is installed at Aeroflot's head office in Moscow and manages the thousands of agents and co-opted personnel who use the airline for cover. In Feburary 1 980, the Aeroflot chief in Madrid.

Serge Viktorovich, an identified GRU officer, was expelled by the Spanish government after being caught in possession of classified In the mid-1970s, the Soviet vice-consul in Marseilles, Grigori Rostovski. attempted to recruit a French atomic scientist by offering his wife the prospect of a job with the local Aeroflot office. Rostovski was quietly kicked out by the French in 1976, with no publicity until now. hardware and technology rivals ours. It should.

A lot of it is American. A look at the history of technology transfer to the Soviet across the border in Geneva. Myagkov was especially interested in French communications and transport networks, including the layout and control systems of the French railways. The DST strongly suspected that, through information assembled from the Fabiew ring in Paris, the GRU was seeking to identify possible sabotage targets in France. The Fabiew case illustrates a connection between industrial espionage and sabotage planning, also a preoccupation of the GRU.

The super-secret "Second Direction" of the GRU is responsible for training and supervising Third World terrorists. Attached to the elite Spetsnaz unit! Moscow's answer to the Green Berets are equally secret "staff companies" whose members are trained to operate behind enemy lines, in civilian clothes or Western uniforms, in order to sabotage vital installations and to assassinate political and military leaders. Soviet defectors have described realistic rehearsals in which GRU elite forces link up with "sleeper networks" of agent-saboteurs in Western countries. Sabotage appears to play a central role in Soviet war planning, which gives an ominous significance to the effort the GRU devotes to gathering apparently routine information on transport systems and energy facilities in the West. "The easiest targets for agent recruitment," says Vadim, "are unmarried female secretaries in their 30s or 40s.

They are especially vulnerable and may have more access to confidential information than anyone in the office except the boss. I was taught to regard them as pure gold." With the constant pressure to recruit agents, GRU officers stationed abroad are trawling for catches at all levels of society. Trade exhibitions are a favorite hunting ground. At recent Paris air shows and at maritime exhibits in Amsterdam. GRU men bearing suitcases stuffed with Western banknotes have shown up bent on persuading businessmen to deliver prohibited technology.

The GRU tends to be much pushier and less subtle in its sales pitch than the KGB. Vadim comments on the prevailing mentality: "It's like trying to get a girl into bed. The GRU approach is to say. 'Let's do The KGB spends a lot more time on flowers and courtship." Considering the sheer scale of Soviet spying the KGB and GRU run more covert operations each year than all Western secret services put together and such cases as the theft of classified satellite data from TRW Inc. in California, one might wonder how many secrets the West has left to steal.

Vadim offers one consoling thought. "What's the biggest secret the Soviets would like to steal from the United States?" he was asked. "Oh. that's easy," he responded without hesitation. "It's beyond price.

We'd pay billions, but we can't get it for any amount of cash. It's the secret of making bread." ranee has also been the scene of some dramatic recent cases of the GRU's involvement in "Line Soviet spy jargon for the theft of science and technology. Early last year, Gen-nadiy Travkov. a career GRU officer serving under cover as Soviet consul in Marseilles, was declared persona non grata after he was causht with plans of thcMirage-2000 fighter plane. In March 1977, the French security ser machines, which produce pinhead-sized ball bearings, vital to the manufacture of advanced inertial guidance systems for intercontinental ballistic missiles.

For 12 years, we refused Soviet requests to sell the machines to them. When the Nixon Administration extended the hand of detente in 1972, the Soviets asked again. The sale was approved, and the Russians bought 1 64 machines for $20 million. At that time, the best Soviet ICBM was a nuclear blunderbuss, packing a mighty wallop but often missing its target by three miles or more. Today, with the help of the ball bearings made by the Bryant grinders plus American computers and know-how the Russian SS-1 8 multiple warhead rockets can hit the bull's-eye within 500 feet or less, leaving our fleet of 1054 Minuteman and Titan missiles sitting ducks in their silos.

Our response? The proposed MX movable-missile system estimated to cost up to $60 billion. Believing the Soviets interested in massive purchases of jumbo jets, we allowed a team of 20 high-ranking Soviet scientists, engineers and KGB agents to tour the Boeing aircraft plant. According to Gen. George Keegan head of Air Force Intelligence from 1 97 1 to 1 977 they took thousands of pictures, viewed the assembly lines, were given mountains of information and had access to secret laboratories. It was later learned that the visitors wore special shoes that picked up metal shavings to reveal secret alloys used in jumbo jet construction.

Subsequently, instead of buying American planes, they built their own wide-bodied Ilyushin jet transports and powered them with copies of Rolls-Royce jet engines made under American patent. Dr. Miles Costick, head of the Washington-based Institute on Strategic Trade, testifies regularly before Congress on technology transfer. He notes that Soviet embassy employees in Washington, including known KGB agents, are allowed to attend Congressional hearings on defense and national security. And they own computer terminals that link them to American data banks, providing instant information on new products and patents.

"With technology transfer," Costick says, "we have saved the Soviets well over $100 billion in research and development costs." Union reveals that in the pursuit of during the 1970s, we allowed the Soviets to take or buy vast amounts of superior technology much of it having direct military application that took us years, and cost us billions of dollars, to develop. We opened our industrial plants, research laboratories and universities to Soviet scholars, scientists and spies. That process is continuing under the Reagan Administration. Under detente," we supplied the technology-starved Soviets with sophisticated computer and electronics hardware. We also built entire factories and assembly-line production plants in the Soviet Union.

After the Soviet army, rolled into Afghanistan in December 1979, the flow of computers and other sophisticated equipment was halted, and the State Department was ordered to clamp down on Russian scientists who were flocking here to study in sensitive areas. However, in the 1 8 months between January 1980 when the embargo supposedly went into effect and June of this year, some 450 Russian scientists and technicians have been granted visas by the State Department. They have been allowed to attend conferences or study such topics as lasers and optics, high-energy physics, computer software engineering, particle accelerators and other highly technical disciplines. Another 77 Soviets have been allowed in for study under U.S. government-sponsored exchange programs.

The New York-based International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), which arranges scholarly exchanges between the U.S. and the USSR and Eastern European Communist nations, placed 3 1 top Russian scientists in study programs for the 1980-81 academic year at such institutions as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Northwestern and UCLA. Says Sen. Jake Garn Utah): "Allowing them to study high-level technical subjects is far more damaging than selling them grain. They are causing us to spend billions of extra tax dollars on defense." A case in point: the Bryant grinding vice, DST, rounded up a network of GRU agents in Paris headed by Serge Fabiew, a Frenchman born in Yugoslavia of Russian extraction.

Fabiew had been recruited by a GRU man called Ivan Kudriavtsev who served under cover as a counselor at the Soviet embassy. Kudriavtsev offered to pay off Fabiew 's business debts if he would collaborate in recruiting and running agents. Fabiew subsequently made a secret visit to Moscow in 1964, signed a contract to work for the GRU and received Soviet citizenship. He became the control for a network of agents including an employee of the French civil aviation authority who supplied plans of airports, an engineer with Honeywell-Bull who forwarded plans of advanced electronics systems, and an aviation specialist with Fiat's subsidiary in France. Fabiew's last Soviet contact prior to his arrest was a GRU officer called Grigori Myagkov, who operated under cover of the International Labor Organization PARADE SEPTEMBER 6.

1981 9.

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About The San Bernardino County Sun Archive

Pages Available:
1,350,050
Years Available:
1894-1998