re: Cold war history buffs, who were the better spies?

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Can you expand on this?

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I think one of the ones they prevented initially, was a civil war in Lebanon back in the early 60s, and the need to invade Egypt in the 50s even well before Suez, when German rocket scientists began engaging in a breakneck engineering program to arm Egypt with the tools for WMD. They also preempted a PLO conflict I want to say in '74. They assisted Morocco in murdering a dissident leader in '65 as well.

I really do recommend Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations, for a decent run down of some of the interesting targeted killings the Israelis conducted.

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It’s not necessarily a fair comparison since free, open-market democracies will be easier to spy on than a closed off communist overly-militaristic shite hole.

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This. And the KGB was huge with a half million employees and millions of informants.

The US got more bang for the buck but Soviet paranoia led to them allocating a far larger percentage of their resources to their agencies than we than we did. They may have been better than us at human intel gathering but they should have been given their disproportionate spending, size, and advantage of operating in an authoritarian society. But at the end of the day it was that same paranoia and emphasis on keeping up with the US that ultimately fricked them.

When they declassified their documents after 1991 we found out they had hundreds of operatives in various levels of our government including our nuclear weapons programs. We weren't able to infiltrate on that scale but at the end of the day we didn't have to.

Mossad and it's not even close

Thanks