Hearkening back to Cold War anxieties, growing signs of spying on U.S. universities are alarming national security officials. As schools become more global in their locations and student populations, their culture of openness and international collaboration makes them increasingly vulnerable to theft of research conducted for the government and industry.
“We have intelligence and cases indicating that U.S. universities are indeed a target of foreign intelligence services,” Frank Figliuzzi, Federal Bureau of Investigation assistant director for counterintelligence, said in a February interview in the bureau’s Washington headquarters.
This is not new thing.
The NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, started operations to penetrate Western institutions of higher learning starting back in the 1920s.
A number of famous Soviet operatives were recruited in the the United States and Great Britain prior to the outbreak of World War Two.
Some of them penetrated our government and other institutions at quite high levels.
Amplifying information is quite available on these persons in the public record. Fot those who care to acknowledge this fact.
The General Electric Company, for one example, had a major union operating within it that had clear connections to the Soviets.