Soviet Espionage

What is the extent of the amount of Soviet spies in the West? How much influence did they have? What were their true goals? How successful was Soviet espionage? How highly exaggerated was the threat of them? I highly doubt that subversion was something that they were interested in; the idea of subversion is something that rightards love to get paranoid about.

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quora.com/How-did-the-Soviet-Union-have-such-a-formidable-and-extensive-espionage-capability/answer/Chuck-Garen
arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/how-soviets-used-ibm-selectric-keyloggers-to-spy-on-us-diplomats/
dandorfman.livejournal.com/404804.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Agent's_Blunder
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TASS_Is_Authorized_to_Declare…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Season
youtube.com/watch?v=baYEMiTnrrs
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_support_for_the_Khmer_Rouge
jakkkobinmag.com/2015/04/khmer-rouge-cambodian-genocide-united-states/
deviantart.com/users/outgoing?https://espressostalinist.com/2011/10/27/pol-pot-was-not-and-is-not-a-communist/
msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/polpotmontclarion0498.html
antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=1807
thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/US_PolPot.html
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quora.com/How-did-the-Soviet-Union-have-such-a-formidable-and-extensive-espionage-capability/answer/Chuck-Garen

nice

There's a book from the 80s worth reading by John Barron called KGB: The Hidden Hand. It's definitely a cold warrior book and likely produced in cooperation with the U.S. intelligence services (it exposed an alleged KGB infiltration attempt into Japanese political parties; so the answer is that the CIA had its tentacles in the book's release). Anyways it is less sensational than what you might expect from that time and goes into how the KGB operated.

"Subversion" is kind of a loaded term. The goal of a foreign intelligence agency is to advance one's nation's interests.

Anyways I haven't read the whole thing but some parts. I've got it sitting in a pile of books. A bunch of the material is about how the KGB agents in Japan would impersonate as sources and supply fabricated documents to the Associated Press, which were then turned into scoops that proved embarrassing to the Japanese and U.S. governments. And others had infiltrated the Japanese security services and stole documents with agents' names and addresses.

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About the same as the CIA. The KGB’s purpose wasn’t to spread Communism, but to compete with he US over geopolitical influence, similar to the CIA who worked with Pol Pot even though he was a communist. The Cold War was a geopolitical struggle, not an ideological one.

Right. And a lot of what intelligence agencies do is cultivate sources (either wittingly or unwittingly) which can provide secrets or further recruits. Secrets could include political decisions or inside scoops on how senior leaders are thinking, diplomatic decisions, military decisions and technology; industrial technology – many different things.

There are wilder plots we've all read about and it has become so technological these days, but a lot of it is an agent working out of the embassy as a cultural, diplomatic or military attache, or working as a journalist or businessman, and spending most of his time writing reports and cultivating access to people and institutions in the targeted country. A lot of having drinks and coffee with various people. The business side can be people creating a front business and even designing technological hardware over a period of years but the real purpose is to acquire more sensitive stuff which can then be smuggled out of the country (like FPGAs).

I was in D.C. a few years ago having a beer and as my group was leaving, someone pointed out the Russian defense attache having drinks on the patio – the guy the attache was having drinks with was a member of a conservative "think tank." I was like "oh huh. Well I guess that's normal." And there's this beefy, ex-military Russian guy sitting there in jeans and a nice, well-fitting blazer having happy hour with some dweeb in his late 20s who worked for that "think tank." The dweeb probably has a job in the Trump administration now. Anyways, the attache was 100 percent working for Russian intelligence because that's just how military attaches function.

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arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/how-soviets-used-ibm-selectric-keyloggers-to-spy-on-us-diplomats/

I like this thread, here's a bump

Interesting titbit but the Czechs had a spy in the British government on and off 20 years. His role was Postmaster General & Minister of technology. The thinking is he provided the Czechs with weapon designs so they could produce them and sell them, not so they could win the cold war.
Another one is that when my dad worked in the FRG, he had a DDR spy in his office whose brother was stealing docs from the government. Never knew why or what docs they were.
A lot of the time it was Les subversion and more working out what was going on in the enemy's camp.

Does anyone know some espionage movies produced by the Eastern Bloc?

Seventeen moments of spring,is a serie