Special (Agent) Delivery

Senator David Boren, back from an Intelligence Committee trip to the Soviet Union, is brandishing a unique souvenir.General Vladimir Kryuchkov, chief of the KGB, gave the third-term Oklahoma Democrat a newly issued series of stamps honoring some of the spy agency’s biggest heroes. Included in the set: Kim Philby, the notorious mole in the British intelligence service who defected to Moscow in 1963 and joined the KGB’s inner circle. In jest, Senator Boren asked his Soviet host why Philby’s equally famous fellow double agents, Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, had not been given their own stamps. “That’s the next series,” replied Kryuchkov.