Customer Reviews

The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (v. 2)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

The book is a very interesting continuation to the first volume of the metrokin archive. I would howerver like to point out that at the middle of the book the form of writting of the book becomes very dull because all the charpters are prepared in the same way. To be fair probably from a scientific point of view this is the most correct form to do so, however at some point the reader becomes a bit bored. Chapters that speak of Iraq, Syria, Israel and Afganistan are very interesting, specially because they purport the russian or soviet point of view for strategical analisys. Nevertheless its a good book and provides good information.

This book is even better than the first one (in my own opinion).For years,we were told that the front lines of the cold war were in Europe with the third world serving as a battlefield where the superpowers can fight proxy wars.Before this book came out we were very familiar with the CIA's role in Iran,Guatemala,Guyana,indonesia,Chile and other places using dirty tricks and covert operations to promote american interests.This book details the KGB 's equivalent operations.We learn that the KGB sponsored a "Hostile takeover " of india;that it was in close contact with Salvador Allende and Fidel Castro and that it was the main support for the ANC during the apartheid struggle.The book shows that although the KGB had numerous tactical successes ,in the long run this could not help the Soviet system as communism was a flawed ideology and doomed anyway.

This book was a very good history lesson of the Thirld World and showed how the Soviet Union's meddling shaped it. Despite its length and sometimes monotonous feeling, you walk away with a lot of information and a nice history lesson.

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

This is the second volume of KGB history put out by Andrew and Mitohkin, this time focusing on their exploits in the third world, in some cases, much more successful efforts than in the West. For those of you too young to remember the Cold War, this is the battle and what it was about. Since MAD virtually guaranteed world annihilation, this was the next big war that raged for close to 50 years. This was the Soviet side and their efforts to turn the third world to their cause, with varying degrees of success. For instance, Cuba? A real win for them. Afghanistan? Not so much. This book details in great detail what role the KGB played in Soviet foreign policy formulation and implementation. The chapters on Afghanistan alone are worth he price of the book. But, like it's predecessor The Sword And The Shield, this is very much like an encyclopedia and can seem dry reading compared to sensationalist fare like Spy Handler ( another great book, though). Approach with caution unless you want some very good introduction to the other side's story from their own words.

It is a well written study of how the KGB tried to manipulate and fight the cold war in the third world.

I was a bit disappointed though after reading at the start how this new and great archive was now available. Yet little of it is presented here. Overall there seemed little radically new in the book although there are some new and interesting points.

For example in South Africa, I never realized how much the USSR and South Africa must have traded during the apartheid era in diamonds.

The writers argument which I think is correct is that the KGB was one of the major means used by the Soviets to spread communism throughout the world. Often they were more inventive and clever then their enemies. Unfortunately for the USSR, either the form of communism that took shape in these third world countries produced a rival for example China or they became a major drain on the Soviet economy. Often they were played by the locals just like the US.

At the end of the Cold War, in the third world as in many other fields the Soviet's economy could not afford the price.

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

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.

The author describes the sinister activities of the KGB in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East from the conception of the USSR until its undoing in about 1990 or so.

The facts that are presented are mind bogling, there seem to have been no ethical limits for the KFB.

The book is not a non-fiction book for the average layman, but it seems to be geared more towards historians, or VERY interested laypersons. It lists too many facts and details, which at times becomes boring.

One would have hoped for more facts about the historic background of the specific time and place, and less details / names. (Of course the professional reader has no need for this......)

It takes some perseverance to finish to book!