Bill to Regulate KGB Given Preliminary OK

Soviet lawmakers Tuesday approved draft legislation that, for the first time, will regulate the activities of the KGB, the country’s security and intelligence agency, and protect the rights of those it investigates.

Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, chairman of the State Security Committee, as the KGB is formally known, told the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, that the agency believes a law defining its authority while protecting civil rights is a major and essential step toward establishing constitutional rule here.

“I believe that concern over how the security bodies will operate is understandable in view of our history,” Kryuchkov told deputies, alluding to the key role played by the secret police in dictator Josef Stalin’s long reign of terror and in the later repression of political dissidents.

“The sooner we pass this law and the earlier it is grasped by every Soviet citizen, the more this will help reassure the public about the KGB’s actions today,” he said.

Despite criticism by liberals that the guarantees of civil rights still are insufficient, the Supreme Soviet gave preliminary approval to the legislation, sending it to its committees for possible amendment before its expected enactment later this month.

“The bill on state security bodies is based on care for human rights,” Kryuchkov argued. “In the past, we proceeded from the interests of state security. Our attitudes have changed radically, and now we proceed from the interests of the individual.”

Under the bill, the KGB is called on to protect the Soviet constitutional system, still defined as socialist, and to defend the state’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, its economic and defense potential and its citizens’ rights and interests from foreign espionage and subversion and from illegal “encroachments” by individuals or groups in the country.

The KGB’s primary functions will include intelligence and counterintelligence, information gathering and analysis, fighting organized crime, protection of the country’s leaders, preservation of state secrets and guarding the country’s borders.

The law defines limits for the KGB in its operations and establishes procedures of accountability to parliamentary bodies and the courts.

“We need this law,” Kryuchkov told deputies. “The KGB cannot work without firm regulation by the law as the basis for its activities. As we strive to establish a state run by laws, such legislation will be an important guarantee for the citizens exercising their constitutional rights and freedoms, and I am sure that it will also enhance the KGB’s efficiency and reliability in ensuring the country’s security . . . .

“We must reckon with the fact that the shadow of the mass repressions that the KGB bodies were involved in during the years of the (Stalin) personality cult falls, willingly or not, on our time as well . . . . We always stress that the Soviet people must be sure that, neither today nor in the future, such lawlessness will not be repeated.”

But Kryuchkov, reacting to sharp questioning by liberal deputies, made it clear that the KGB does not plan to change all that radically.

It would retain its widely hated system of “secret assistants,” a nationwide network of political informers, as a way to broaden its efforts, he said. He said also that it has tracked down seven of the 16 acknowledged KGB defectors--and six of those had been tried for treason and executed.

Kryuchkov defended his old comrades in the security police in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and East Germany under the former Communist governments in those countries as able, decent men who did a necessary job, and he decried their prosecution by the new governments.

“My counterparts honestly worked for their regimes,” he said. “Now that the system has changed there and other political forces have come to power, secret service personnel are called to account simply because they at some time worked in the state security agencies. This is unfounded legally and simply unfair in human terms.”