I wrote:
Millions of people opened up telephones in the 1960s, including me.
I might add that my father was something of an expert at spotting and disconnecting 1940s era listening devices, because he traveled around Russia during WWII on U.S. Embassy business. The only way to get room service at the hotels was to disconnect the bugs. That brought someone up from the front desk in minutes.
As one person explained, the only way you could get them to come up and spray the real bugs was to disconnect the telephone bugs.
Russian phone service was erratic back then, even though they invented the telephone. (According to Stalin, anyway). It sometimes took 10 minutes or a half hour to place a call. Once, a group of Americans were sitting talking about calling someone. After a while the phone rang, and it was the person they were going to call, who was on the line saying, "Hello? Hello?" Apparently, the KGB agent monitoring the conversation decided to save them some time, so he rang up the person they were going to call, got a connection, and then rang back to them.
Along the same lines, Americans walking the streets were followed at a discrete distance by KGB handlers, "mainly for our own protection" as my dad put it. When my dad would stop to buy ice cream, he would sometimes buy two, hold one behind him and gaze off in the other direction. The KGB agent would come up and take the other, with a quiet "spasibo" (thanks).
The cold war was not as dramatic, dangerous or even unfriendly as it was made out to be. American nationals caught as spies in Russia in the 1940s through to the end of the cold war were seldom harmed. When they would catch one of ours, we would go out and catch one of theirs, and trade. On the other hand, Russian citizens caught spying for the U.S. in Russia were tortured and killed.
- Jed
