Thread by @KyleWOrton

In Sept. 1971, the KGB's Oleg Lyalin defected from the London Embassy and told the British government about the really alarming (and some quite bizarre) "special actions" the Soviets had been planning on the West, precipitating the mass expulsion Soviet spies in Operation FOOT.

The interesting thing is that this meant the West was quite well aware, from near the beginning of Andropov's renewed campaign, that Soviet terrorism was a very real phenomenon, and yet down to the end most in the West considered it a "conspiracy theory"

https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1438265324097396748

The KGB recruitment of Wadi Haddad of the PFLP in 1970 was the turning point: his Palestinian group was given weapons that even Eastern Bloc states hadn't received and given tasks as various as kidnapping CIA officers and assassinating Soviet defectors.

Another early terrorist gang that the KGB turned to was the IRA

https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1438266225998667783

Still, the Lyalin defection in 1971 had a similar effect in dampening KGB enthusiasm for direct "special tasks" in the same way Bohdan Stashynsky's defection in 1961 largely got the Soviets out of the assassination game in the West. Proxies began to be favoured for both.

When the KGB head Yuri Andropov was writing to Brezhnev to ask permission to use the Palestinian terrorists to kidnap a CIA officer in Beirut, he began by saying: "It appears expedient ... to abduct the deputy CIA resident ... "

Gotta love "appears expedient".

In fairness to Andropov, he did quite genuinely believe the CIA was engaged in kidnapping KGB officers all over the place - not least because that's what embarrassed residencies kept telling him when people defected.

https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1438271421407539201