August 8, 2006: The KGB lives, and is still participating in Cold War era activities like killing enemies of the state and harassing troublesome diplomats.
Really.
The Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union is not over, sort of.
While the U.S., and its allies, won the Cold War, and the Soviet Union is gone, one part of the Soviet Union, Belarus, remains, well, rather Soviet. Belarus (formerly Belorussia, or "White Russia") was one of the parts of the Soviet Union that became an independent country in 1991. But rather than become a democracy, the Soviet era bureaucrats who used to run the place when it was part of the Soviet Union, continued to run the new state of Belarus. Little changed. Belarus still has a KGB, and the KGB still does the dirty work for the minor league tyrants that still run Belarus. A recent incident featured the KGB bugging the home of a Latvian diplomat, and passing the video, of a homosexual tryst, on to a state controlled television channel. The KGB also raided the diplomat's home, saying that is was searching for pornographic material. In fact, the Latvian diplomat was being harassed for meeting with opposition politicians. Can't have that, not in the Soviet State of Belarus.
But the KGB went too far. While the Soviet Union could shrug off the occasional abuse of diplomatic immunity (which they did), because of their superpower status, Belarus barely qualifies as a minor power. The Vienna Convention, to which all nations subscribe, prohibits violations of diplomatic immunity. Iran trampled on the Vienna Convention back in 1979, and is still paying the price. Belarus is hoping their KGB will get them out of this mess. Somehow. But the Belarus KGB is not much of an intelligence agency, in any sense of the word, having been largely taken over by a bunch of politically well connected thugs.