the symbol of St. Vladimir, frequently used by Ukrainians, to demonstrate the continuity and interrelatedness of Russian and Ukrainian tradition. The trident was also used by NTS as a revolutionary symbol, called the "forks of the people's anger". Perhaps the most famous NTS member was Alexander Galich, a Ukrainian screenwriter and bard who joined after he was exiled from the USSR for his critical songs and dissident activities. Counter-Revolutionary activity The NTS believed that force was the only means by which the Soviet regime could be toppled, and that an internal revolution was the best means for this. The group made several attempts at sending its people into the USSR illegally before, during, and after World War II for the purpose of creating an underground revolutionary force in Soviet Russia. The organization, despite the support of foreign intelligence agencies, could not match the powerful network of the OGPU and NKVD. The pre and post war attempts were the least successful, often ending in shootouts with the Soviet authorities, or capture. The war period was the most successful, although there were a high number of casualties who either suffered at the hands of the German Gestapo, or sleeper cells which were uncovered by the Soviet secret police. The NTS was also actively involved in the Russian Liberation Movement during the war. William Blum has claimed in Killing Hope that the CIA worked with the Russian exile anti-communist group National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS) in covert operations inside the Soviet Union. Blum claims the CIA covertly trained, equipped, armed and financed the NTS out of West Germany and secretly dropped their operatives as paratroopers into Soviet territory. From there, Blum claims these groups engaged in actions such as assassinations, stealing documents, derailing trains, wrecking bridges and sabotaging power plants and weapons factories. The Soviet Union claimed it caught about two dozen of these operatives, including a former Nazi collaborator, and subsequently had them executed. The organization adopted a new strategy after the war called the "molecular theory" of revolution, where Soviet citizens were urged (via propaganda literature and radio messages) to create "molecular revolutionary groups" no larger than three people in size in order to minimize the risk of infiltration. These groups were to keep in contact with the NTS center which was located in Frankfurt, Germany. At a ripe moment, the center would coordinate the activity of the molecules and