Yeltsin Gets Approval for Separate KGB : Soviet Union: Security agency under local control in his federation could cause tremors.

In a development symbolizing the shift of Soviet political power, Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin said Wednesday he has received permission, in principle, to form a separate KGB state security agency for his republic that would be under local control.

Yeltsin, the anti-Establishment politician who once portrayed himself as the target of a KGB assassination plot, told the Russian Federation Parliament that he discussed the founding of a separate state security agency with KGB Chairman Vladimir A. Kryuchkov and received Kryuchkov’s consent.

The legislative basis for the independent agency, which would break more than seven decades of monolithic and legally unfettered Soviet state security operations, could be in place by November, Yeltsin said.

The Russian leader’s announcement, reported by the official Soviet news agency Tass, is likely to resound throughout Soviet society, where millions still fear or loathe the descendant of V. I. Lenin’s Cheka and Josef Stalin’s NKVD. They believe the KGB has remained above the law, despite President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s democratic reforms.

The most recent demonstration of the suspicion and hostility aroused by the KGB came on Sunday, when a crowd broke into the agency’s local offices in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, and seized documents, video equipment and other property of KGB officials. They demanded that the KGB be abolished in Georgia.

In a vigorous reaction, the KGB denounced the “extremist manifestation of a frantic campaign against state security bodies” and blamed “Western special services” for inciting its foes by spreading anti-KGB propaganda.

In an interview with the visiting board of directors and executives of the Associated Press wire service, Kryuchkov on Wednesday also highlighted the changes in his agency by saying that the Soviet Union is willing to share intelligence on Iraq with the United States, the AP reported. But it said Kryuchkov added that such an offer hadn’t been made directly to the CIA because past KGB proposals of assistance had been rebuffed.

“I am convinced we could really tell each other something valuable,” Kryuchkov told his American guests, without giving details.

By seeking local control over the Committee on State Security, or KGB in Russian for short, Yeltsin reverses centuries of practice that have allowed the national government, or ruler, to run an internal surveillance network. Some historians trace that practice to Ivan the Terrible’s band of murderous thugs, the oprichina, which answered to the 16th Century czar alone.

With the ex-Communist Yeltsin now at its head, Russia has been a closely watched bellwether for other Soviet republics seeking to break the hammerlock of the central bureaucracy’s control.

By agreeing to allow a Russian KGB, the national government would make it nearly inevitable that each constituent republic will acquire its own agency, further limiting the ability of central authorities to determine what officials on the periphery should do.

That concession to greater home rule, in the framework of the new federal arrangement being debated here, may be necessary to salvage anything like today’s KGB.

The KGB has vast and varied responsibilities, from checking the passports of foreign travelers who land at Moscow’s airports and patrolling the country’s borders to counterespionage at home and spying operations overseas. Under Gorbachev, it has also been drafted into the battle against organized crime and racketeering.

Throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, the KGB hounded political dissenters, a function that is now regarded by many here as a shameful phase of its existence. But under a Gorbachev-mandated restructuring, it replaced the anti-dissident department with one charged with protecting the Soviet constitution about a year ago.

For many, however, the KGB’s political functions remain too secret and hence suspect.

Before he became the Russian Federation’s president this summer, Yeltsin told a murky and bizarre tale of attempted assassination, claiming that he was crossing over a river in a Moscow suburb when a car ran him off a bridge. His account was never clear, and many gossiped that he had simply quarreled with his mistress. Some Soviets, however, sensed a KGB plot to murder their champion.

What Yeltsin and Kryuchkov apparently have in mind is a division of labor between the new Russian Federation agency and the national KGB, whose Moscow headquarters in the grim and gray Lubyanka Prison still arouse a shudder in citizens who recall the millions unjustly confined or shot in Stalin’s terror campaigns.

But it is not immediately clear how the work would be split.