MrP
Banned
At the height of the Second Cold War, the Soviet capability to steal technology from the West was critically compromised by a KGB defector, who gave French counter-intelligence services extensive information on Soviet industrial espionage operations in Western countries. The information was forwarded to the CIA.
The blow came at a particularly bad time for the USSR, as the Reagan administration was then stepping up the arms race, and the Soviet economy, which could no longer rely on oil exports to stay afloat due to the counter-shocks of the early 1980s, was entering terminal sclerosis. So WI Soviet industrial espionage had been able to continue unimpeded throughout the 1980s? Would it have bought the USSR more time before its collapse? Would it have allowed Gorbachev to not make a mess of Glasnot and Perestroika?Vetrov was an engineer who had been assigned to evaluate information on Western hardware and software gathered by the "Line X" technical intelligence operation for Directorate T, the Soviet directorate for scientific and technical intelligence collection from the West. He became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist system and decided to work with the French at the end of the 1970s. Between the spring of 1981 and early 1982, Vetrov gave almost 4,000 secret documents to the DST, including the complete list of 250 Line X officers stationed under legal cover in embassies around the world.
As a consequence, Western nations undertook a mass expulsion of Soviet technology spies. The CIA also mounted a counter-intelligence operation that transferred modified hardware and software designs to the Soviets. Thomas Reed alleged this was the cause of a spectacular trans-Siberian pipeline disaster in 1982.