Cold War spy memories

This seems to be a week for spymasters and spy agencies, a bygone era of the Cold War. On Monday, the body of William Colby -- master of the CIA's espionage programs -- was found in a Potomac River tributary south of Washington nine days after he went missing while canoeing.

Colby's tenure in office as CIA chief attracted more criticism than praise. One of his most controversial operations was "The Phoenix Program," a series of political assassinations carried out in the name of preventing communism from sweeping through Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

According to an official report to the U.S congress, 20,000 Viet Cong died, some at the hands of U.S assassins.

The former CIA chief, however, defended the program, saying it was justified. He added that the adverse comments about it were made by critics of the military.

Colby was also responsible for a few of the CIA's disruptive operations in Latin America. In the 1960s, plans were already in the pipeline to eliminate the left-leaning Salvador Allende, who seemed a popular choice to replace the corrupt right-wing regime of Chile at that time.

In the 1964 election, the CIA spent twice as much in bribes per Chilean voter to block Allende as the total spent on campaign expenses per voter by both parties in the U.S. elections of the same year.

As newspapers around the world were carrying Colby's obituary, another cloak-and-dagger episode was resurrected in Europe. It seems old habits are hard to break, despite the end of the Cold War.

The Russian intelligence service, known as the FSB, claimed that as many as nine British diplomats in Moscow were career spies. It said that their cover was blown when a young Russian civil servant was arrested for selling state secrets to British intelligence.

The Russian Foreign Ministry is keeping its fingers crossed that the affair will not damage bilateral cooperation. But if all nine British diplomats are asked to leave, it will clearly have some repercussions.

Other Western nations will become concerned as Yeltsin may lose valuable international support. But the stakes for the Russian leader and his friends in the West are high. If the communists win the June presidential polls, spy scandals will once again become a common occurrence, reminiscent of the dark days of East-West hostility.

-- The Nation, Bangkok