About 25 years ago I visited the Soviet Union as a tourist. After we had gotten off the airplane in the Moscow airport the passengers were led in a group through the dark, dreary airport to customs, baggage pickup, etc. At one point each passenger was taken, one at a time, by a guard into a small room, about 10 feet by 10 feet, in which a man in a uniform was sitting behind a desk. After the guard told us to stand in front of the desk, the glum-looking man sitting behind it stared at our face for about 20-30 seconds, then nodded and the guard took us out of the room and we continued on our way. Does anyone know what that was all about?
No definitive answer to your question, but some observations:
I entered the USSR quite a number of times between 1983 and 1991, from West Germany via East Germany, and never experienced this, neither when entering/exiting at Sheremetevo II nor on internal flights… This episode was separate from passport control, right? (at passport control a very young/junior looking officer in a booth took quite a long time scrutinizing passport and visa and seemed to click some keys, in an area hidden from my sight by the counter plate, but only looked at me for some seconds.)
Was the occasion of your visit the 1980 Olympics? They might have laid some additional security on for that occasion.
My WAG is that the officer in question was selected for his good memory for faces, and had memorized the photographs of known Persons Of Interest To The Authorities.
Sorry for post not directly answering your question, but: I went in and out of Domodedovo this May, and security was a nightmare there like at no other airport. It took 90 minutes to get out (long customs lines) and 90 minutes to get in (everyone was getting frisked). It was 85 degrees inside the airport, there was nowhere to sit, and I had serious GI problems. It made Heathrow seem like a pleasant stroll.
They were checking to see if you were nervous. Little in the SU those days to do computer background checks, etc. Thus who got searched, etc. was more a matter of the “gut feeling” of Mr. Customs Man. Much like police asking suspects to take a lie detector test. They can’t force anyone to do so. However, refuse and you get on the top of the file of “potential suspects.”
I would be.
My mom vetted the people designing Canada’s Chalk River NRU reactor by chatting with them. If they seemed like nice people, they were in. If not, then not.
Going on “gut feelings” and whether someone is a “nice person” is scary. I just finished reading 109 East Palace, about the community of Los Alamos while the bomb was being developed. One of the people who was accepted by all as just the nicest, kindest fellow turned out to be the spy who was providing tons of info the the Soviet Union.
“You can fool all of the people some of the time,
and all of the people some of the time,
but you can’t fool mom!”
– Captain Penny’s Law, from the Linux fortune files.
I certainly do not know the answer to the OP.
But, if I knew I had to arrest a person (or some people) on Flight 123, such a system would be most useful. Each person comes in. If they are not of interest, they pass on. If “their papers are not in order,” you can arrest them in private. His buddies would be none the wiser.
“Nice” is subjective. So you would consider someone who spied against the “Evil Empire” for the US “an unnice person.”
I’m just guessing, but I base that on from what various other security folks have said. Even store dicks looking for shoplifters. And all store dicks aren’t “nice”. I once had a bad run in with such. Unbeknownst to me, and also the cashier, a small item was left in the cart and not paid for. I was arested for shoplifting. The store dicks even testified at the preliminary exam they didn’t see me attempt to conceal it (after searching me and finding it wasn’t on me, they finally found it in the cart! At the trial, the judge got visibly annoyed, and just dismissed it. And then had some nasty words for the prosecutor for having the temerity to bring to his court a case where the “evidence” was basically "because our cashier was so dumb to not notice that item in that cart, and at the time even we didn’t know the item was there, obviously this was intentional on my part and I was therefore guilty.
I must not have made myself clear. As reported in the book I read, the others at Los Alamos believed the individual in question to be pleasant, mild-mannered, kind, trustworthy, and so on. Years later he was revealed to be a spy. In fact, he was probably still a “nice” person. He also was a Communist who believed strongly that the Soviet Union should have The Bomb, too.
I was responding to Muffin’s post immediately preceding mine.
My point was that whether a person seems as if he is “nice” or not, this is an unreliable measure of his potential to be dangerous. In the case of Los Alamos, a spy was trusted because he seemed like a friendly and pleasant individual. In the NRU reactor case, it seems to me that a potentially dangerous person could have been permitted to work on a sensitive project.
Nice tells you mostly nothing about whether or not to trust someone. In fact, some very “nice” people are simply very good at being charming and are in fact con men/women.