Monday, November 26, 2007

Despite Hanging Around and Hanging Around (and Having Alligator Blood), Illness Finally Gets Rid of Him

I know when you see the name Vladimir Kryuchkov, you think you remember someone by that name playing for the Red Wings. Not quite. This guy had a job just as glamorous. And now he's dead.

The Soviet Union's former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, one of Russia's most influential hardline spy masters, has died aged 83, Russia's foreign intelligence service said on Sunday. Kryuchkov was fired as head of the KGB in 1991 for taking part in a failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev that hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. He died in a Moscow on Friday after a long illness...

Krychkov rose swiftly through the KGB after serving in Hungary to become head of its first department, the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence service, from 1974 to 1988. As Moscow's chief spymaster, he was a key supporter of the 1979 military intervention in Afghanistan and one of Moscow's most influential hawks.

I wasn't alive back then, but I would love to know what Soviet "doves" were like.

[Reuters]

1 comment:

Danny said...

If in the poker game of life women are the rake, in the poker game of death women are the shovel.