Right Books

■ The West doesn’t deserve to be winning World War III, and strictly speaking it isn’t—the other side is losing. In The KGB against the Main Enemy: How the Soviet Intelligence Service Operates against the United States (Lexington Books, 384 pp., $19.95), Herbert Romer-stein and Stanislav Levchenko illustrate, the proposition. Theirs is an eye-opening history of Soviet spying and “active measures” in the U.S. since 1920.

An open society is, by definition, more vulnerable than a closed society to hostile secret activities. It doesn’t follow, however, that the U.S. must handicap itself in the secret war; yet America is handicapped, if not paralyzed. An example: in 1981, a GRU (military intelligence) officer called at the office of a Republican congressman and asked for a copy of a plan for basing MX missiles. Sensibly, an aide refused the request and called the FBI. “These agents,” said the aide, “operate with impunity on Capitol Hill.” Of course, the CIA enjoys no reciprocal rights in the Kremlin, and although the U.S. has enforced travel restrictions on most Soviet diplomatic personnel—to match those imposed upon American embassy officials in Moscow—no such checks apply to Soviets at the UN. Fair enough, one might say, except that both Capitol Hill and the UN are off limits to the FBI.

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■ The West doesn’t deserve to be winning World War III, and strictly speaking it isn’t—the other side is losing. In The KGB against the Main Enemy: How the Soviet Intelligence Service Operates against the United States (Lexington Books, 384 pp., $19.95), Herbert Romer-stein and Stanislav Levchenko illustrate, the proposition. Theirs is an eye-opening history of Soviet spying and “active measures” in the U.S. since 1920.

An open society is, by definition, more vulnerable than a closed society to hostile secret activities. It doesn’t follow, however, that the U.S. must handicap itself in the secret war; yet America is handicapped, if not paralyzed. An example: in 1981, a GRU (military intelligence) officer called at the office of a Republican congressman and asked for a copy of a plan for basing MX missiles. Sensibly, an aide refused the request and called the FBI. “These agents,” said the aide, “operate with impunity on Capitol Hill.” Of course, the CIA enjoys no reciprocal rights in the Kremlin, and although the U.S. has enforced travel restrictions on most Soviet diplomatic personnel—to match those imposed upon American embassy officials in Moscow—no such checks apply to Soviets at the UN. Fair enough, one might say, except that both Capitol Hill and the UN are off limits to the FBI.