“Instructions from the Centre: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975-85”

From “The Centre” the KGB headquarters in Moscow pours forth an avalanche of top secret documents to its residencies the world over.
During the decade which culminated in the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, Oleg Gordievsky, at that time a Colonel in the KGB, regularly risked his life by making copies of these documents. And now, for the first time, in Instructions from the Centre, a revealing selection covering the main priorities of Soviet foreign intelligence operations at the time has been translated and analysed by the joint editors. Christopher Andrew provides the commentary.
In the KGB´s priorities the United States – the “Main Adversary” in Centre jargon – was never far from its thoughts, although as one report acknowledges it had “not had great success”, infiltration by such agents as it had being “unsatisfantory”-
Agent recruitment is however regarded as the first priority – and here for the first time are the KGB´s instructions on how to do it, complete with the personality questionnaire that covered every possible trait of likely targets from self-discipline to sexual perversion.
The practical instructions include an astonishingly detailed description of how to establish a dead letter box in London´s Knightsbridge (inside Brompton Oratory) and signal sites for its illegals in Mayfair (blue chalk marks on specified lamposts).
Instruction from the Centre offers a highly classified insight not merely into KGB foreign operations at the dawn of the Gorbachev era, but also into the thinking of its top leadership at the beginning of the 1990s – and, in particular, into the mind of General V. A. Kryuchkov, KGB chairman, and one of the leaders of the abortive coup of August 1991.

(tegemist on mahakantud raamatukogu raamatuga)