Best Counterintelligence service during the Cold War

The Stasi had the local population so well penetrated with informers and agents, they practically had the entire country under observation. From a visit to the Stasi museum in Berlin, the estimate was something like 1 in 10 (or higher) was either a member of, or an informant for the Stasi. This even impressed the KGB back in the day.
IIRC they even collected scent samples of people and then kept them in sealed glass jars for years or decades in case they ever needed to use sniffer dogs to try and track them. It's things like that which really do show you how much of a twilight zone the GDR was.


As for the British? Couldn't find a spy even if they walked around London naked holding a banner with a red star on it saying KGB spy.
I'll concede that early on they weren't all that effective, witness the Cambridge Five I mentioned earlier, but once they got over that whole right sort of chap/one us mentality in the late 60s/early 70s they don't seem to of been too bad. I honestly don't remember them being worse than any other comparable countries after that.
 
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