During his lightning-speed offensive in the summer of 1941, Hitler destroyed Stalin's European ground troops west of Moscow. In mid-October, Stalin read in his office his short order to his top military and "party" men. He said that there were no troops to defend Moscow. Stalin was waiting for Siberian and Far Eastern troops to arrive. Meanwhile the Soviet "Party and the Government" as well as the Soviet General Staff should be immediately evacuated eastward.

A panic and flight from the city began. Even the managers of food stores abandoned the precious food, and were fleeing. If Hitler had one common Muscovite as his spy, he would have known how easily he could occupy Moscow between mid-October, when the panic began, and December, when the Siberian and Far Eastern troops had arrived. But Hitler did not have even one spy among Muscovites. He did not occupy Moscow, and lost the war.

As far as intelligence-espionage is concerned, Hitler's dictatorship was an exception because Hitler personally hated intelligence-espionage as beneath the dignity of a soldier.

As an example of the intelligence/espionage of a dictatorship, I will take Soviet Russia, which the post-1949 China has been copying, while Putin's Russia is an ally of China and is returning to its pre-1991 dictatorship.

The Soviet border was a military defense line of fortifications, secret patrols, and dogs, trained to track down whoever would attempt to "cross the border." A poem for children of school age described how "an enemy, a spy, and a diversionist," able to carry out "diversions," that is, arsons, explosions, assassinations, and other terrorist acts, crossed the border despite all precautions!

But how was it known that this border-crosser was "an enemy, a spy and a diversionist"?

Every "Soviet citizen" of 16 and older carried a passport (called an "internal passport" in Western languages, to distinguish it from a "foreign passport"). The passport indicated in particular its bearer's ethnicity, his or her place of residence (as permitted by the police), and his place of work (also registered by the police). According to memoirs of CIA officers, neither the CIA, nor the British Intelligence Service ever tried to forge a Soviet passport, which would have been futile, since all of its data were in the Soviet police files, and a telephone call would establish whether a passport had been forged.

That border-crosser in the Soviet poem had, obviously, no Soviet passport. So he could not prove that he was NOT "an enemy, a spy, and a diversionist." Hence this is what he was by definition, and was to be shot as such. In Soviet Russia, those 12 or 20 "illegal aliens" in the United States would have been shot as "enemies, spies, and diversionists."

In the Soviet poem, the border-crosser or "illegal alien" found himself in "the border belt," a strip of inhabited land behind the military defense line of fortifications, patrols, and dogs. He met schoolchildren and asked them for a way out of the border belt and into the country at large. One of the schoolchildren volunteered to lead him out. But walked him, instead, to his death at the border guard station.

In the border belt, this law is never dim:
We know everything, we know everyone –
Who you are, who I am, and who is HIM!
At school concerts, the poem was recited by an artistic senior school girl, who would point her finger at someone in the public ("Who you are"), then at herself ("Who I am"), and then in the direction of the exit door, behind which "an enemy, a spy, a diversionist" could be hiding.

For a dictatorship to have in the United States 12 or 8 or 20 million low-level spies is no problem. For the CIA and British Secret Service to recruit in Soviet Russia one lowest-level spy was virtually impossible. Their spy whom they have glorified more than any other was Oleg Penkovsky.

After Stalin's death, in 1953, the Soviet intelligence officer Penkovsky began to grumble that without Stalin everything went from bad to worse. He could not be dismissed, and he was demoted to the performance of this function: Soviet scientists and technologists who went abroad were to take notes there of everything remarkable in their fields; and the demoted Penkovsky was to accompany such delegations, collect their notes, and store them.

As revenge for his demotion, Penkovsky accosted a CIA officer and volunteered his services as a CIA agent. The CIA took it for a provocation, but he approached someone from the British Intelligence Service. They accepted him, but soon destroyed him by arranging his meetings in Moscow with the wife of a British embassy official. The British Intelligence Service did not even know that all foreigners were watched all round the clock – at least as soon as they stepped out of their embassies or legations. Penkovsky was immediately detected, sentenced to death, and burned alive in a crematorium.

Penkovsky could become a low-level British–U.S. spy because he had been demoted (and hence was allowed for a while to go abroad). Typically, he did not ask the U.S. and British intelligence agencies to pay him. A Soviet person valued not money, but a high bureaucratic position. So, when Penkovsky was in Britain, he was happy to try on the uniforms of the British and U.S. colonel.

As for high-level spies, no Soviet officials who had access to secret data were allowed to go abroad. Indeed, those working on superweapons, for example, could not leave the site. Not to let them feel confined, clothes from London were brought for men, and those from Paris for ladies. Their ball was as chic as anything in the West.

The Soviet money bought only the simplest necessities in "open trade" for the common population. Anything more luxurious – chic apartments, chic cars, chic furniture, etc. – was "received" by an official according to his rank. In the 1930s, one of my uncles, who was "deputy people's commissar of food industry" "received" as "taste samples" all of the country's choicest food (free of charge, of course!).

On the other hand, judging by the mainstream TV, the United States is a country-size store, preoccupied with the sale of numberless goods and services. The U.S. or any other convertible currency seems to many the elixir of happiness, including immortality when medicine one day discovers it. In Stalin's Russia, immortality as a result of intense research was intended for Stalin, but in the United States it would go to the highest bidders.

Robert Hanssen was a "top FBI overseer of U.S. counterintelligence." He became on his own initiative a Soviet spy in 1979 and was arrested only in 2001 after he had been observed "dropping" a package of secret data at the "drop site" for the Soviet agents to pick it up in exchange for $50,000. They also paid in diamonds. Thus the FBI counterspy, supposed to catch Soviet spies, was a Soviet spy, protecting Soviet spies in the United States and informing the Soviet counterintelligence of U.S. spies in Soviet Russia.

No motive of his can be detected except dollars and diamonds (as good as dollars). He was a spy for the Soviet pre-1991 dictatorship as well as for post-1991 Russia. He was a devout Catholic, and attended Mass weekly with his wife and six children. Besides, he is said to have attended Mass daily on his own on all the other days of the week. When he sold secret FBI data for the first time (for $20,000) in 1979, his wife learned about it and made him confess it to a priest, who did not break his vow of confidentiality, and the spying continued on and off for 22 years. Catholicism was more important than the United States.

At one time between 1975 and 2001, Hanssen's FBI salary was $110,000 a year. What did he need first Soviet and then Russian dollars and diamonds for? A stupid question. On $200,000 or $300,000 a year, you can, better than on $110,000 minus taxes, keep your wife in style (look at those Saks Fifth Avenue prices!) and raise six children (think of medical expenses, in addition to an even very good medical insurance plan, and think of Ivy League colleges for them).

Besides, the devout Catholic Hanssen "had illicit relations with a stripper," who went with him on a trip to Hong Kong and whom he gave money, jewels (diamonds?), and his Mercedes, as allegedly "totaled." He was also preparing for his flight to Russia in case he saw the danger of his exposure, and had $800,000 in a Russian bank account. He was not sentenced to death – he was to work for the FBI while in confinement. In his photographs of 2001 and 2002, he is smiling a broad, smug, cheerful smile: "Never say die!"

A top U.S. holder of secret intelligence/espionage data can go for his vacation to a country in which not a single American lives but which had a Soviet legation (and now has a Chinese legation as well). High-level intelligence/espionage data in exchange for money, the elixir of happiness (including some day immortality)! Globalism! World trade! How to become rich, happy (and perhaps some day immortal)!

The intelligence/espionage of the CIA and the British Intelligence Service?

In the CIA (to take it as an example), the salaries are good (at least for those who do not have six children), the lunches excellent, the social benefits generous, and the retirement is early. The ladies and gentlemen, employed by the CIA, sit in their spacious well-conditioned offices and type as intelligence/espionage data those fantasies of theirs that fit the prevailing conformity and help the U.S. government to carry out its foibles such as the invasion of the oil-rich Iraq.

When the prevailing conformity from the second half of the 1940s to the 1960s was that Soviet Russia was going to attack the United States, there was a doubt when Soviet Russia had no trans-Atlantic bombers or missiles. So the CIA invented that Soviet bombers would be refueled in mid-air over the Atlantic. When the prevailing conformity changed in the 1970s, the CIA represented to the U.S. Congress both Soviet Russia (developing post-nuclear superweapons) and China (about to do so) as the most peaceful, friendly, and humane countries imaginable.

Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.