Kalugin mentions that he came to the U.S. with a group of "students" from the USSR, the first such group after World War II. Of the 18 students 17 were either KGB agents like Kalugin, or co-opted agents. The only exception was Alexander Yakovlev, who later was the Soviet ambassador to Canada and the "godfather of glasnost." Yuri Bezmenov in his interview with G. Edward Griffin accused Yakovlev of getting him fired from the CBC:
I started working for [the] overseas service of [the] CBC, which is similar to Voice of America, in Russian language, and of course [the] monitoring service in [the] USSR picked up every new voice—every new announcer they would make it a point to discover who he is—and in five years, sure enough, slowly but surely, they discovered that I am not Tomas Schuman, that I am Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, and that I am working for Canadian broadcasting, and undermining [the] beautiful détente between Canada and [the] USSR. And the Soviet ambassador Aleksandr Yakovlev made it his personal effort to discredit me; he complained to Pierre Trudeau, who is known to be [a] little bit soft on socialism, and the management of CBC behaved in a very strange, cowardly way, unbecoming of representatives of an independent country like Canada. They listened to every suggestion that [the] Soviet ambassador gave, and they started [a] shameful investigation, analyzing [the] content of my broadcasts to [the] USSR. Sure enough, they discovered that some of my statements were probably too... would be offending to the Soviet politburo. So I had to leave my job.In an upcoming post I think I will explore the question of why it is always kooks and outsiders like Griffin and Howard Phillips, who interviewed Kalugin here, who take the time to talk to these Soviet defectors and ex-spies.
