VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV
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people he represents. We have two subsidiaries, you know: the
Russian Party and the PLO."
It was the mention of the PLO that really made me prick up my
ears, because it was the first time I had heard such a thing. Inci–
dentally, I wasn't sure who was the subsidiary of whom. "Do you
mean," I asked, "that the KGB had a hand in the Munich massacre?"
"Well, I think it's safe to say that nobody really wanted to kill
them.
If
the Israelis had been more willing to talk, everything would
have turned out all right, as I see it. Of course, the Palestinians can't
be controlled right down to a
T.
They're like a genie. Once you let
him out of the bottle ...."
"But isn't the KGB afraid its people will be exposed? After all,
not long ago Gunther Guillaume of Willy Brandt's staff was exposed
as a spy for East Germany."
Chudinov smiled ironically. "Don't feel sorry for Guillaume.
We ourselves expose people like him - or we help to expose them.
For us, his exposure was a thousand times more important than the
work he did."
Then, satisfied with the impression he had made on me, he
added, ''And you think we're nothing but fools."
I have no notion why Chudinov was so frank with me - both on
that occasion, and on another that I am still afraid to write about.
His frankness, however, was not much to my liking, since in a way it
deepened my involvement with the KGB - something that was
already a burden to me. As for what he told me about Guillaume, it
did not alter my opinion of the KGB's intellectual level. Their
exposure of their own agent (if, indeed, they had actually exposed
him) had been prompted by the instinct of self-preservation. Soon
after the scandal broke, Brandt had to resign as chancellor. His Ost–
Politik, however, withstood the blow.
It
was only later that it col–
lapsed, along with detente, with the accession to power of Carter
and his political Mephistopheles, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
And what if, despite the hatred between Brzezinski and the
Russians, he, like his successors on Reagan's team, was just what
they wanted? For today the KGB needs enemies more than it needs
friends, whether those enemies be foreign or domestic. Enemies
stimulate its activity and justify its existence, both politically and
ideologically. The collapse of detente, along with an exacerbated
feeling that Russia is threatened from without, and isolated from its
neighbors and even from those nations subjugated to it, dictates to
