KGB Chief Blasts Dissident Former Official

The head of the Soviet intelligence agency attacked a dissident former high-ranking KGB official today as an opportunist who disclosed state secrets to further his own career.

Vladmir Kryuchkov, the KGB chief and a member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo, used a speech at the 28th Party Congress to attack outspoken former KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who says the KGB is an anti-democratic organization largely untouched by perestroika, the reform program.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev issued a special order late last month stripping Kalugin of his rank and numerous medals after he charged that the KGB still spies on new parties and participated in an official plot to discredit populist politician Boris N. Yeltsin.

Kryuchkov said that radical statements by Kalugin, who headed the KGB’s foreign counterintelligence division in the 1970s, were a recent phenomenon.

“He climbed the service ladder without saying anything critical about the KGB or the political system,” Kryuchkov said. “He (now) portrays himself as a democrat who saw and foresaw everything.”

The KGB chief mocked Kalugin’s claim to have spoken out against the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

“Clearly, Kalugin talked about this so quietly that no one heard,” he said.

Writing in the youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, Kalugin said there had been 20 defections by KGB officials since 1980, but Kryuchkov said today there were only eight defections.