Lithuania Attack Victim Was With KGB, Soviets Say

The KGB sent agents to the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius before the military crackdown, and one of 14 people killed in the storming of Lithuania’s television center was a secret police operative, the official Soviet government newspaper said Friday.

The disclosure in the Izvestia evening daily appeared to support claims made by some Lithuanians that last Sunday’s operation, in which soldiers in tanks took the television and radio tower surrounded by civilians, was directed from Moscow.

Izvestia linked the KGB intelligence agency to the operation in investigating the death of Lt. Viktor Shakskikh, who was among the 14 people who died in the pre-dawn raid.

“According to information received on Jan. 18 at the KGB public relations center, Lt. Shakskikh was a KGB staffer,” the newspaper said. “He was sent to Vilnius as part of a small group to render assistance in stabilizing the situation in the city within his competence.”

Another newspaper, Moskovsky Komsomolets, said Shakskikh belonged to the top-secret “seventh directorate” of the KGB and quoted reliable sources as indicating only Gorbachev has the authority to send them on such a mission.

“Competent sources maintain that even (KGB) chairman (Vladimir A.) Kryuchkov cannot send them anywhere by his own personal decision,” the newspaper said.

Stepan Sulakshin, one of several Soviet deputies in Vilnius to investigate the violence, told the local legislature: “After two days in Lithuania, I am ready to state that a well-planned action is being carried out in Lithuania, commanded and coordinated not here, but from the center, in Moscow.”

Another Soviet lawmaker, Georgy Tarazevich, was also in Vilnius and holding talks with Lithuanian officials as Gorbachev’s personal representative.

The nationalist Lithuanian government said after Sunday’s repression that Soviet soldiers shot Shakskikh because he refused to participate in a violent crackdown against mostly unarmed civilians.

Military officials claimed he was slain by a nationalist vigilante belonging to armed units of the Sajudis Popular Front, saying his death showed the threat faced by soldiers in Vilnius.

Kryuchkov, the KGB chief, said Friday that Soviet troops came under fire outside the television center and “behaved with dignity” in the crackdown.