KGB: Russia's Old Boychiks

The Soviet secret service is getting bigger--and better

Panama City, Fla., 1971: Carrying a hefty attache case, U.S. Air Force Sergeant Walter T. Perkins walks to a commercial jet destined for Mexico City, where he plans to rendezvous with an agent of the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service. In the attache case are top-secret U.S. plans for defense against a Soviet air attack. Air Force security men arrest Perkins as he boards, and his KGB contact, Oleg Shevchenko, flees Mexico for Cuba.

Damascus, Syria, 1974: Hidden KGB cameras click softly, and a secret microphone records the tender dialogue as an Arab diplomat dallies with a male paramour in the city's infamous Turkish baths. Threatened afterward with disclosure of his homosexuality, the diplomat agrees to pass information to the KGB.

Jerusalem, 1976: The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church makes his pilgrimage from Moscow to the Russian Orthodox Church in Israel, the sole building in that country allowed to remain in Soviet hands after Israel's 1967 break with the U.S.S.R. Accompanying the Patriarch on his mission, as usual, is a squad of KGB agents bearing communications equipment and funds for local agents. Vladimir Ribakov, the administrative manager of the church in Jerusalem, is the KGB's chief agent in Israel.

These are only a few of the thousands of known incidents that shed a sliver of light on the sweep of Soviet intelligence activities round the world. Western authorities view the KGB as a worthy and persistent foe. Says a former high CIA and State Department official: "They're a lot better than we think: I think they're damn good."

The KGB'S budget has grown to an estimated $10 billion (v. the $7 billion that the U.S. spends on the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies), and its roster, which approaches half a million employees, has grown dramatically since 1974. Western experts believe it has five times as many people involved in foreign intelligence as the CIA and Western European spy agencies combined.

A major European intelligence service claims 24% of the Soviet diplomats accredited to embassies in Western Europe are KGB agents; there are 87 such agents accredited in West Germany, 53 in Italy and 98 in Finland. About 35% of the 136 diplomats accredited to the Soviet embassy in Washington are believed to be KGB agents, and others serve as Tass correspondents, trade representatives and employees of the Soviet airline Aeroflot.

International agencies, including the U.N., are another favorite KGB cover. European intelligence experts estimate that 105 to 135 KGB agents are assigned to the U.N. in Europe. One is Alexander Benyaminov, appointed in 1976 to the data processing section of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a post that puts him in contact with those who possess nuclear secrets. Often the Soviet ambassador to a country is a full-fledged KGB agent. In Greece, he is Ivan Udaltsov, who, while serving as counselor at the Soviet embassy in Prague, helped to crush the Czech reform regime of Alexander Dubcek in 1968. Three months after he arrived in Athens in 1976, Ambassador Udaltsov was accused of funneling $25 million to the Greek Communist Party; unfazed, he called a press conference to declare: "I was not upset by those reports. The KGB is a highly respected organization set up by Lenin to protect the socialist revolution and the Soviet state."

Indeed it is. The KGB center, as its command complex of buildings is called, is located only a few blocks from the Kremlin--at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square. The dour, ocher-colored buildings look down on the Bolshoi Theater and the entrance to Red Square. The agency has a huge network of informers within the U.S.S.R., and it can often veto applications for new jobs, visas and university admissions. It operates prison camps and mental hospitals and directs the Soviet campaign against dissidents. Lubyanka Prison, where victims of Stalin's purges, such as Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, were executed, is part of the 2 Dzerzhinsky Square complex of buildings.

The KGB (the Russian abbreviation for Committee for State Security) is a descendant of secret police agencies maintained over the centuries by anxious Russian czars; after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Communists called their secret police, successively, the CHEKA, GPU, OGPU, GUCB/NKVD and MGB, the KGB'S forerunner. Today the agency has a force of 300,000 men under arms to guard Soviet borders, as well as a corps of customs agents. Intourist too works closely with the KGB; tourist guides can steer chosen visitors to restaurants that have hidden microphones.

The KGB'S boss, Yuri Andropov, took command in 1967, and in 1973 became the first KGB head since Stalin's dreaded Lavrenti Beria to join the ruling Politburo. Andropov, 63, is said to admire modern art and to be a witty conversationalist who speaks fluent English--a portrait that contrasts with his harsh actions as Moscow's Ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 uprising. Under Andropov, says one Western analyst, "the thugs are being weeded out of the KGB."

The KGB recruits from the elite of the Soviet Union's managerial class by means of an Old Boychik network. Picked for loyalty, intelligence, presence and family connections to the party and the agency, KGB recruits are often sent to Moscow's prestigious Institute for International Studies for intensive courses in foreign cultures and languages. KGB agents are given preference for scarce apartments in

Moscow and buy such rare foreign goods as stereos and Scotch at giveaway prices. They socialize with each other and often intermarry.

"The really boring Russian diplomats are not KGB," says one Western intelligence agent. The KGB man often wears Western suits (veterans of U.S. service favor Brooks Brothers). He--or she--entertains freely, and spends more money than non-KGB apparatchiks.

Abroad, the most sociable KGB agents pose not only as diplomats but also as trade representatives and journalists. Their mission: gathering scientific and technical as well as military and political information. It is pursued directly by inviting employees, journalists and politicians to lunch or parties, and also by covert means.

In the field, KGB agents prepare annual plans that project, among other things, the number of collaborators they will recruit in the coming year; their performance is judged against the plan. Blackmail is a favorite recruitment tactic, with sex and drugs the standard come-ons, but sometimes other pressure is applied as well. Last month Iranian Major General Ahmed Mogharebi confessed that he had spied for the KGB after Soviet agents threatened to reveal his past membership in Iran's outlawed Communist Party, Tudeh. The leader of the Iranian spy ring, a government official named Ali-Naghi Rabbani, had sophisticated radio equipment for receiving Soviet satellite transmissions in his home. Rabbani's clandestine contact was the Soviet consul in Tehran, Boris Kabanov, who was expelled from the country. Both Mogharebi and Rabbani were sentenced to death; late last month Mogharebi was executed by a firing squad.

In the Soviet Union, the KGB attempts on occasion to entrap foreign diplomats and journalists, especially ones it wishes to expel. When he was working for U.P.I., Christopher Ogden, now a TIME correspondent, was invited to a mysterious street-corner meeting in Moscow in 1973. He was offered the "secret plans" for a Soviet troop crossing into China.

He declined them.

Because most of the KGB's effort is aimed at free and open Western societies, KGB tacticians stress the use of agents on the ground, instead of electronic intelligence gathering, at which the U.S. is stronger. The KGB excels at recruiting new agents: with only some exaggeration, a West German intelligence expert says, "There is not one place in the world where the KGB does not have its man." Indeed, Superspy Colonel Rudolf Abel, apprehended in New York in 1957, was found to command a vast net work of agents that ranged over the entire North American continent. Today the KGB cooperates closely with the East German Ministry for Security, which in 1972 successfully planted an agent, Guenter Guillaume, as a close aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Guillaume spirited NATO defense and other secrets out of West Germany until his arrest in 1974. Last year French counterintelligence (the DST) broke up a spy ring that gave the Soviets information about the advanced Mirage-2000 fighter plane and NATO defenses. Israeli officials were shocked in 1972 when they deciphered the code used for radio transmissions between Cyprus, the KGB's Middle East headquarters, and Moscow, and discovered the Soviets had obtained full details of a planned Israeli retaliation raid against Syria. Damascus had the plan four hours before the scheduled Israeli raid.

Of course the Soviets have had their share of intelligence failures. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the KGB failed to detect Israeli preparations for crossing the Suez Canal, and underestimated the maneuver's importance once it was under way. In New Delhi, the resident KGB team concluded that Indira Gandhi would easily win re-election in 1977. More embarrassing was the gambit of Vladimir Rybachenko, who served in Paris as a UNESCO official. Shortly before Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev arrived in Paris on a good-will visit in 1976, Rybachenko was caught receiving secret documents that described a French Defense Ministry computer system. Rybachenko was expelled. Then there was the gift by Colonel Vassili Denisenko, the Soviet military attache in Switzerland, to an under cover KGB spy of 13 years.

Denisenko gave a pair of golden cuff links bearing the hammer-and-sickle crest to Swiss Brigadier General Jean-Louis Jeanmaire. When Jeanmaire wore them, Swiss security agents had their first clue to his treachery; he was sentenced to an 18-year prison term.

Western analysts believe the KGB has several flaws that result from its enormous size and the Soviets' authoritarian mentality. KGB agents overcollect, flooding the district and home offices with so much data that the agency does not or cannot efficiently separate the significant from the trivial. This may explain why, according to a defector, KGB field men in the Middle East reported on Israel's plan to strike Egypt in 1967, but the word never got to Egypt. The society that creates KGB inefficiencies is also an enormous advantage to the agency, permitting it great latitude without measurable objection from its populace. After all, the agency is charged with silencing domestic critics, including any who would make so bold as to criticize the KGB.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.