Ironically, however, it was the heartland of Asian Communism which from the early 1960s onwards became the hardest target for Soviet foreign intelligence operations. Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung turned their brutalized countries into security-obsessed societies where the KGB found it as difficult to operate as Western intelligence agencies had done in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Even the ‘sickly suspicious’ Stalin (as Khrushchev correctly called him) seems never to have imagined that Mao and Kim would one day dare to reject Moscow’s leadership of world Communism.1 When Mao visited Moscow late in 1949 after the declaration of the Chinese People’s Republic (PRC), he won a standing ovation for delivering a deferential eulogy at Stalin’s seventieth-birthday celebrations in the Bolshoi.2 Kim Il Sung, though impatient to invade South Korea, did not launch his attack until Stalin gave him permission. Stalin allowed the Korean War to begin in June 1950 largely because he had misjudged US policy.
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