How Best to Curb the Secret Police : KGB reform won’t go far without independent judiciary

The benefits to the Soviet people of curtailing KGB operations could prove considerable. One appropriate analogy would be to liken the change to living in sunlight as opposed to a life of darkness.

A massive, oppressive secret-police structure such as the KGB inhibits, represses and perverts many aspects of normal life. Candor and openness become a subversive activity. Artistic expressions have to pass absurd doctrinal tests.

Perhaps more than any other single feature, it is the surveillance capabilities of a secret-police system that citizens come to hate. Ever-present eyes and ears drain a culture of its normality, its spirituality, its humanity.

OBSERVED SOCIETY: A secret-police internal spying program generally has four purposes. One is to provide the government with new information. Another is to confirm the continuing validity of old information. The third is to uncover information that will help agents to make appropriate arrests and to determine the nature and duration of appropriate punishment. And the fourth is to contribute to the overall intimidatory goal of keeping normally quiet people deaf to the political pitch of those who might resist or refuse to be intimidated.

It is as much to the normally quiescent as to the potentially troublesome that a secret police devotes its activities. Certainly that was the domestic franchise of the KGB’s notorious Seventh Directorate. In addition to the many supervisors, case officers, analysts and technicians, this directorate employed many thousands of agents to spend their professional lives doing little more than watching others.

The Moscow unit of the directorate operated a special taxi fleet and Intourist motor pool to enable the KGB to literally pick up almost anyone calling a cab or hiring a car. It is that kind of smothering that now promises to be lifted from Soviet life.

FEARED RESURRECTION: But that may not happen. For secret police organizations tend to have a lives of their own. They tend to survive the downfall of regimes, to resist reformist efforts to drive them to the grave. They have an inherent resilience that makes them very difficult to cut down to size.

In Iran the regime of Islamic fundamentalists succeeded in overturning the shah’s governmental infrastructure, which included the hated SAVAK secret police. But to meet their own internal-security needs they then created SAVAK’s successor: SAVAMA. Many of the clerks, technocrats, translators and even some operatives who had worked for SAVAK suddenly found themselves in the employ of SAVAMA.

The fear of a similar metamorphosis now haunts Chile. With the retirement of the Pinochet regime, DINA, the hated secret police, was dismantled. In theory at least. Will it rise again in some other form, like SAVAK?

JUDICIAL EMPOWERMENT: That can happen when a reform doesn’t go far enough, when it doesn’t elevate the power of the judiciary over the power of the secret police. For the naming of a new secret-police chief and the reorganizing, and even downsizing, of the internal-security apparatus are not enough. All that will go for naught if the power of the secret police is not subject to judicial review. Such powers include, for instance, preventive detention. Allowing the secret police to hold suspects in custody indefinitely--much less to torture or murder them--is the road to repression. A society that does not allow its courts the power to curb the police is a society that courts the power of the secret police.

Putting a new leader at the helm of a secret police isn’t enough; even cutting the budget isn’t enough. Freedom-seeking peoples must also insist that the judiciary, not the police, be the court of last resort.