The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World

by Christopher M. Andrew and Christopher Andrew

Book Overview

In 1992, Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist, snuck out of Russia carrying with him a vast cache of transcriptions of top-secret KGB intelligence files. The FBI later described his trove of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465003117
• ISBN13: 9780465003112
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
• Length: 676 Pages
• Weight: 2.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 6.6" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

History of the KGB

Comprensive story of how the KGB operated, and how they corrupted so called democratic leaders in the world. Very good, interesting for espionage amateurs.

Time to Re Write the History Books

With a paltry budget of $3bil a year, the CIA's counter intelligence operation had to fight a KGB/GRU monstrosity 20 times its size, one wonders how the West won the Cold war. For far to long, any time the KGB was implicated in a situation it was dismissed by the press as some kind of "right wing hyperventilation". Many of the cold war martyrs canonized by the left, i.e. Allende, turned out to be on the KGB's payroll. Simply put, this book has the potential to change the history of the Cold War as we know it.

Perkele

A good account of facts which were relatively unknown to common people. Corruption and exploitation are two main problems encountered by the Third World, perhaps initiated by different superpowers during those days. Superpowers do not exist any more but unfortunately those countries of the Third World are still struggling both politically and economically.

Extraordinary largely for showing contractors as the weak link

This is, like the first book, an extraordinary piece of scholarship. While it can be tedious in both its detail and in the drollness of the "accomplishments" that enjoyed so much Politburo attention and funding, it joins books such as Derek Leebaert's The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World in documenting the insanity and waste that characterized much of the so-called "secret wars" between the US Intelligence Community (within which the CIA is a $3 billion a year runt against the larger defense budget approaching $50 billion a year) and the KGB and GRU. For those who have the patience or speed to get through this entire book, the single most important revelation and documentation concerns the ease with which the Russians were able to recruit traitors within the US defense community contractors. Ralph Peters has written about this in New Glory : Expanding America's Global Supremacy but speaks mostly of legal treason--corruption and waste. This book carefully addresses the sad reality that DoD is totally penetrated by foreign spies (one would add, Third World and allied spies including France, Germany, and Israel, never mind China and Iran) via the contracting community. One day someone will do a careful calibration of both the good and the bad of secret intelligence. When that day comes, this book will be as good a place as any with which to start. Best General Couonterintelligence Books: Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catcher's World Merchants of Treason America's Secrets for Sale from the Pueblo to the Present

Wonderful

Communism used to have footholds everywhere, and the KGP was the true puppet master. However the KGBs rivals included other deviant forms of communism, heresies if you will, such as China, Albania and Yugoslavia. China tried to penetrate Africa in the 1970s, bankrolling revolutions and dictatorships, Cuba was also deeply involved in Angola(to the tune of 30,000 troops) and in Ethiopia. Russia had a toehold in Vietnam, but China was weary of the Vietnamese attempt to overrun Laos and Cambodia in 1975. In South America different strains of communism helped lead to the death of Che Guevara. The war in central America was about Communism and the KGB infiltrated the governments of the Middle east. Khrushchev was the orginal architect of the turn to the third world, realziing that even reactionary third world dictators could be courted through money to help fight America. It was the opposite of the Stalin policty of viewing everyone as the enemy who was not proclaiming friendship. This excellent book looks at the KGB's role in africa though newly declassified documents and access to other hitherto unpublished files. We see many funny apsects of the KGBs role and learn many new things about the extent of the penetration. A fascinating book. Seth J. Frantzman