With the godlike powers that you seem to attribute to the KGB, enquiring minds wonder why the USSR fell apart and Russia has been pretty much of a clown show ever since? My wife lived in the USSR from 1954 until it's collapse and then in the Soviet-style Republic of Belarus until 2008, so she does know whereof she speaks. She joined me just as Obama was elected. Especially under Joe and Kamala, her most frequent refrain was "My God, this is just like the Soviet Union! This is exactly what they did!" She was an almost embarrassingly enthusiastic Trump supporter and remains enthusiastic except for his abandonment of Ukraine. All of these meta-narratives that attempt to explain 60+ years of U.S. history in terms of some simplistic cause like KGB manipulation strike me as unrealistic and, to borrow your characterization of me, as "naive."
I hate to say it, Lance, but your wife sounds either naive or like a politically proselytizing Russia-born DIA agent I know on social media who is very anti-Globalist / anti-Obama-Clinton-Biden, and, it would seem, a bit pro-Putin.
Question: Do you think the KGB went out of existence when the USSR was dissolved in the early 1990s, or do you know that it simply changed the names of its two main components, i.e. the First Chief Directorate (foreign espionage) and the Second Chief Directorate (domestic intelligence and overall counterintelligence) to today's "SVR" (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki) and "FSB" (Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti), respectively?
When you say "60-plus years," I assume you're referring to the 1963 JFKA, not the 1959 decision of the Kremlin to defeat us, not militarily, but by getting us to tear ourselves apart by waging Sun Tzu-like disinformation, "active measures," and mole-based "Inside Man" / "Outside Man" strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us and our NATO allies.
Rhetorical question: Do you know anything about the 1959 Extraordinary (as in mid-term) 21st Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union? It was shortly after it that top-secret Department D (which in 1962 was upgraded in status and resources and renamed "Service A") was set up in the First Chief Directorate. A General Gribanov, not to be outdone, set up his own deception-based Department 14 in his Second Chief Directorate and, after GRU Lt. Col. Oleg Penkovsky had been "trapped like a bear in its den" in such a way as to not reveal the "mole" in American or British Intelligence who had betrayed him in early 1957, proceeded, in late 1961, to send GRU Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov and KGB Major Aleksei Kulak (in early 1962) to the FBI's NYC field office to volunteer to spy for it at the U.N. For what it's worth, six months later, Gribanov sent Jefferson Morley's beloved putative KGB Major I mean Lieutenant Colonel I mean Captain Yuri Nosenko to the CIA in Geneva to discredit what a true defector, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling James Angleton about possible KGB penetrations of the CIA (can you say feedback artists Bruce Leonard Solie and Leonard V. McCoy?) and the intelligence services of our NATO allies.
Regardless, I find it interesting that an anti-CIA/anti-Clay Shaw article published in a Communist-owned Italian newspaper (Paese Sera) in 1967 motivated overly ambitious, scandal-plagued and revengeful New Orleans DA Jim Garrison to change his theory against Shaw (whom he'd arrested just three days earlier) from "He masterminded the homosexual thrill-kill assassination of JFK!" to "He Organized The Military Industrial Intelligence-Community Complex Assassination Of JFK For The CIA!!!"
And then, of course, Ellen Ray, the Far-Left publisher of Garrison's 1988 screed,
On the Trail of the Assassins, gave a copy of it to Comrade Oliver Stone at a 1986 film festival in Cuba.
And the rest, as they say, is Body Politic-Rending Mythology, "Uhh . . . to counter the myth of the Warren Report."
As far as the collapse of the Soviet Union is concerned, it's interesting that KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn tried to warn us in his 1984 book
New Lies For Old that such collapse it would be a ruse to get us to drop our guard.
Which it seems to have done quite spectacularly.
It's also interesting to note that Masha Gessen suggests in her 2012/2014 book,
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, that the 1991 aborted coup in Moscow was planned-to-fail so that the KGB (sorry, today's SVR and FSB) could remain in control.
Not to "rub your nose in it," or anything, but you do remember, don't you, the 2010 phenomena known as "Anna Chapman and The Twelve (or was it thirteen?) Dwarfs," whom the FBI tells us "set up shop" (some literally) in the U.S. and in Canada around 2000?
Just an anomaly?
