KGB Finds Shift to Glasnost Difficult, Chief Says

The long-feared KGB, struggling to adapt to greater openness in Soviet society, has rewritten its rules for the first time in 30 years so secret agents will spend less time spying on ordinary citizens, the agency’s chief said in a remarkably candid interview published Tuesday.

Vladimir A. Kryuchkov also reiterated that the KGB and its American counterpart in many respects, the CIA, should begin exchanging intelligence information to combat terrorism and drug trafficking.

But Kryuchkov said he has faced a tough challenge in trying to “plant into the minds of our staff the necessity of changes.”

“Believe me, this is not a simple chore. We are dealing with approaches, methods, customs which have been consolidating for years and years,” he said in the weekly New Times.

Kryuchkov, who was trained as a lawyer and worked as a state prosecutor before serving for a decade as the deputy chairman in charge of foreign intelligence, was named head of the KGB in October, 1988. Last month he was reconfirmed to the post by the new Parliament, the Supreme Soviet, after tough questioning.

During the confirmation debate, he drew titters of disbelief when he tried to paint the KGB as an agency intended only to serve the Soviet public.

In the New Times interview, he appeared more willing to publicly acknowledge that the agency, long considered pervasive in Soviet society, sometimes abused its powers under the cover of secrecy.

“It’s one thing when you know that absolutely no public control exists and quite a different thing when you are operating under the permanent gaze of the citizens,” he said. “Previously it happened that state interests had priority over civilian needs. This is no longer possible.”

“We’ve got to get used to glasnost (openness), to psychologically adapt,” he said.

Kryuchkov revealed for the first time that the KGB had abolished what he called its “Fifth Department,” whose task was to “exterminate ideological diversions”--a reference to citizens who were viewed as traitors for criticizing the Communist Party, sometimes even in private conversations.

Ordinary Travelers

In addition, he said, the agency has stopped monitoring “ordinary citizens who travel abroad.”

Kryuchkov said that in an effort to win public support, the KGB planned to publish a draft of its new regulations. “I believe the sooner we do that, the sooner we will put an end to the uncertainty” about the agency’s role in society, he said.

He also said he hopes to receive government approval to publicly reveal the KGB budget, which has always been classified.

“We see it as imperative that society sees and understands what we are doing,” Kryuchkov said, adding that such openness is necessary to win the trust of the public and enlist its help in fighting new challenges such as organized crime and industrial espionage.

Organized crime in the Soviet Union, the KGB chief said, “is now growing. . . . We haven’t yet reached the level of the West, but if we neglect this disease, it will become a real torture for our society.”

In addition, Kryuchkov said, the agency has to be on the lookout for foreign industrial espionage. Soviet managers, dealing for the first time on a wide scale in cooperative ventures with Western firms, are “poor businessmen . . . (and) provincial simpletons,” and give away secrets without realizing it, Kryuchkov said.

But he said there also is a fresh opportunity for cooperation with the CIA and other Western security agencies. He hinted that the Soviet Union had provided the United States with intelligence after Israel’s abduction of a Lebanese Shiite Muslim leader and threats against the lives of American hostages held in Lebanon.

“If we get information that someone’s life is in danger, we are trying to pass that information on,” he said. “They highly value this and try to reciprocate.”