Have Your Spy Call My Spy

You know the world has changed when spies offer you their secrets--Go long as you talk to their agent first. Last week the Foreign Intelligence Veterans Association, a group of retired KGB officers, said it had hired Hollywood agent Brian Litman to help sell the stories of their dastardly deeds to Western studios and publishers.

Litman's star property is Col. Oleg Nechiporenko, who met with Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City two months before JFK's death. He says he can explain "why Oswald could not have been a KGB agent"-but you'll have to wait for the book. Another retired colonel, Anatoly Yatskov, set up the heist of U.S. atom-bomb secrets in the'40s. The group's vice president Anatoly Privalov says its 500 members can barely subsist on pensions averaging $7 a month: "We need the money."

Uncommon Knowledge

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

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