Kgb Agents Have Written The Book On Spying Abroad

MOSCOW - They were sitting on the terrace of a Mafia chieftain's villa outside Palermo when the Godfather asked Leonid Kolosov if he was really just a newspaper reporter in search of a story.

"I looked him straight in the eye, as we were taught in KGB school, and lied," Kolosov recalled. He was really just a simple reporter, he told the mobster. Even if he wanted to, he didn't have time to be a spy. Then he recruited the mob chief, Nicola Gentile, as a valuable informer.

Kolosov was a KGB agent in Rome, Paris and Madrid, and his are among the revealing - not to mention entertaining - stories collected in a new book, "Undercover Lives: Soviet Spies in the Cities of the World."

The book, being published in Britain this month by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, is loosely based on a Russian-language book, the "KGB Guidebook to Cities of the World," published two years ago. A U.S. release is not yet in the works.

While the KGB guidebook offered a nuts-and-bolts guide to the world's leading sights, the new book is more of a memoir of spies' lives, from a time when the Cold War made the world's capitals a playground for espionage.

British journalist Helen Womack, a veteran Moscow correspondent, was asked to help translate and edit the original book when it was published by a Moscow newspaper.

"They were giving travel tips to Russians who had never been abroad - you know, if you go to Paris, don't miss the Eiffel Tower," she recalled. "I realized it would have to be completely different for Western readers."

The book offers little in the way of sensational news, although it does describe an aborted plan to assassinate Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and says there were talks between the Soviet Union and West Germany to dismantle the Berlin Wall as early as the 1970s.

Mostly, it depicts the daily lives of agents whose exploits sound like a low-rent mix of James Bond and Boris Badenov of the cartoon series "Rocky and His Friends."

There are tales of love affairs and drinking bouts, of shooting pens and booby-trapped cars, of treachery and - a common theme throughout the book - sincere patriotism.

Mikhail Lyubimov, a KGB agent in London, fondly remembers days off in Hyde Park, jogging or pushing his newborn son in a stroller.

He recalled his amazement at the civility of English police. "Once at night a bobby stopped me: `Excuse me, sir, perhaps it would be a good idea if you put on your lights.' I thought I was talking to Sir Walter Scott."

But he never got over his Marxist outrage at the pampered lives of the British upper class.

Vasily Timofeyev, once the KGB's man in Bangkok and New Delhi, described his absurd efforts to recruit an American yoga enthusiast in the 1970s.

Most of the time, Timofeyev said, he was supposed to be ferreting secrets out of Indians. But the KGB apparently considered any American, no matter how useless his or her knowledge, a prize catch.

Timofeyev described tagging along to a yoga seminar in a provincial Indian city, and participating to prove his sincerity.

Eventually, Timofeyev gave up on his would-be recruit, having concluded: "He was a yoga fanatic and nothing more."