KGB Gives West Peek at Headquarters

The once-feared KGB security police today opened the doors of its Lubyanka headquarters to Soviet and foreign reporters and told them that its goal is to protect human rights while defending the state.

Officials also showed the reporters part of a museum with spy equipment said to have been captured from American agents and pictures of two Russians said to have worked for the United States--both of them members of the rival GRU intelligence organization.

“Our activities must be increasingly subjected to public control and in protecting the state we must strive to protect human rights as well,” KGB spokesman Alexander Karabainov told about 100 journalists.

Karabainov, head of the organization’s new Center for Public Contacts, was speaking at an unprecedented news conference in the grim, gray building where for three decades political prisoners were tortured and shot.

The press tour by the KGB was part of a drive by the organization to present a new image of openness.

Upon arrival, the reporters entered an elevator with buttons allowing them to go only to the fourth floor and lined up to have their names written out in small red books.

In the small museum, an elaborate device used by U.S. agents to monitor Soviet army movements was on display. Photographs showed American diplomats detained in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s on espionage charges, as well as KGB officers arresting Soviet drug smugglers and racketeers.