Day: September 18, 2005

Puzzler #1

OK, if you thought that this blog has no mysteries associated with it, you are wrong. Here is a mystery for you to ponder. About a year and a half ago, I made an offer on this blog: I will send a gmail invite to anyone who emails me a request. I made it clear that sticking a comment at the end of the post asking for an invite will not get a response from me. One has to email me.

People started posting comments asking for gmail invites. Then I edited the post with additional wording in big bold red type saying don’t post a comment, just email me. Now I get about 10 requests a week posted as comments, most of which I delete and only keep the odd one for demonstration purposes.

Now here is the puzzler: what do you think these losers who post a comment asking for a gmail account are going to do with it anyway, considering that they lack basic reading comprehension skills and have the intelligence of a doorknob?

The KGB and Indian Democracy

It’s not surprising but it is still news to me that the KGB attempted to steer the Indian ship of state. I grew up hearing rumors of the CIA doing all sorts of nasty things around the world, of course. The KGB, as the other spy in the real life adaptation of the Mad Spy Versus Spy, was as active I conjectured. Clearly India had enough commies crawling around for the KGB to find willing agents. So when I read (via The Acorn) the TIMESonline of the UK report that KGB records show how spies penetrated the heart of India, I was a sadder but wiser man:

A HUGE cache of KGB records smuggled out of Moscow after the fall of communism reveal that in the 1970s India was one of the countries most successfully penetrated by Soviet intelligence.
A number of senior KGB officers have testified that, under Indira Gandhi, India was one of their priority targets.

“We had scores of sources through the Indian Government — in intelligence, counter-intelligence, the defence and foreign ministries and the police,” said Oleg Kalugin, once the youngest general in Soviet foreign intelligence and responsible for monitoring KGB penetration abroad. India became “a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government”, he added.

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