KGB to Vanish; New Agencies Will Assume Its Duties

The KGB, the sword and shield of Communist rule and the most dreaded force in Soviet society, was ordered dismantled Friday and its spying and information-gathering duties entrusted to new, separate agencies.

The landmark decision by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the other members of the ruling Soviet State Council was openly aimed at breaking the KGB’s stranglehold on state security functions, which made it an indispensable but ultimately dangerous adjunct of power.

The KGB, with the Communist Party and the armed forces, was a member of the troika of conservative bureaucracies that led the failed attempt to depose Gorbachev last August. The agency’s chairman at the time, Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, has been charged with treason and imprisoned; at least three other plotters held the rank of KGB general.

By order of Gorbachev and the leaders of 10 Soviet republics who attended the State Council meeting, the KGB--formally known as the State Security Committee--is to be supplanted by a central intelligence service, an inter-republic agency for counterespionage and a government committee to command the KGB’s 230,000 border guards.

“To eliminate monopolization in the sphere of ensuring state security, the State Council considered it necessary to dissolve the KGB of the U.S.S.R.,” the Tass news agency said, indicating that the leaders’ main motive is the breakup of the sprawling agency bureaucracy, which according to some reports employs 400,000 or more career officers.

It was not immediately clear when the State Council’s decision was to take effect, or whether further action, such as a formal vote of approval from the Supreme Soviet legislature when it convenes again Oct. 21, also will be sought.

The reform evidently brings to a definitive end the organized surveillance of citizens’ political views, a classic KGB function that made the committee the nemesis of the late human rights advocate Andrei D. Sakharov, exiled novelist Alexander I. Solzhenistyn and countless others, linking the KGB in the world’s eyes to the most cynical, brutal abuses of Soviet power.

Under Gorbachev, whose political career was boosted by the late Yuri V. Andropov, a KGB chairman turned Communist Party general secretary, reformers came to believe the agency was incapable of abandoning its repressive ways and learning to respect the rules of democracy, despite a pioneering law regulating it passed in May.

“The KGB remains a militant, armed detachment of the nomenklatura --the privileged Communist Party elite--ready to carry out any of its assignments, even if it means violating the law,” a former KGB lieutenant colonel warned in a letter to a Moscow weekly.

One of the fiercest opponents of the KGB on the State Council is Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, now arguably the most powerful figure in the land. In a radio interview, he once accused the KGB of having threatened to assassinate him with a mysterious device capable of stopping his heart by remote control. He never explained further.

The State Council’s decision reverses a tradition dating back to Communist revolutionary V. I. Lenin and his espionage chief, Felix E. (Iron Felix) Dzerzhinsky, which has granted one government agency in the Soviet Union simultaneous control over spying abroad, conducting counterespionage and repressing dissent.

Vesting so much power in a single bureaucracy made the KGB seemingly all-powerful in its field, although a much smaller military espionage agency, the GRU or Main Administration for Intelligence, also exists.

“The KGB became an instrument, a tool, uncontrolled by anyone or anything, and with that kind of monopoly--communications, the guards, the troops--had a free hand in organizing the coup,” Vadim V. Bakatin, named by Gorbachev to replace Kryuchkov as KGB chairman, once said.

Venting their hostility at the agency that had terrified rank-and-file citizens for decades, thousands of Muscovites cheered one August evening as demonstrators toppled the 14-ton statue of Dzerzhinsky in front of the KGB’s imposing headquarters, the Lubyanka.

After taking charge of the KGB, Bakatin said the revamped agency would work in five areas: intelligence; counterintelligence; combating dangerous state crimes such as terrorism, corruption and narcotics trafficking; guaranteeing the function of important state facilities, and analytical activity.

But even that reduced list was pared by the State Council in the tasks it allotted to the three new agencies.

Appointed the new head of the KGB’s intelligence service last week, longtime Gorbachev foreign policy adviser Yevgeny M. Primakov told reporters that the committee’s foreign intelligence section, formerly known as the First Main Directorate, was in the process of being spun off.

Putting little emphasis on the traditional derring-do of spy craft, Primakov said Soviet intelligence should strive to prevent the return of the Cold War and combat nuclear proliferation, international terrorism and drug trafficking.

Since Bakatin took command, the infamous KGB directorate that once harassed dissidents, since renamed the Directorate for the Protection of the Constitutional System, has been disbanded and top officials, including the chief of counterintelligence, forced out. Gorbachev has also dissolved the KGB’s governing board and put its border guards under the command of the Defense Ministry.

In recent years, public trust in the KGB has plummeted. In a public opinion poll earlier this month, a mere 8% of those surveyed expressed “full confidence” in the committee that once gloried in its role as “sword and shield” of the ruling Communist Party.

BACKGROUND

The KGB is rooted in the Cheka, a security agency the Bolsheviks created shortly after their victory in the Russian Revolution of 1917. “We represent in ourselves organized terror,” pronounced the Cheka’s founder and first chief, Felix E. Dzerzhinsky. His words held true for more than 70 years, during which security agents murdered millions and imprisoned millions more. Under dictator Josef Stalin, agents carried out purge after purge, wiping out virtually the entire upper level of the Communist Party, and bloodily crushed resistance to collectivization. The agency was known variously as the OGPU, NKVD and MGB and finally, in 1954, the KGB. It has played a strong role in political struggles. Initially, the KGB backed President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who took over in 1985. But internal splits developed over Gorbachev’s efforts to open up the Soviet system. In the failed August coup, for instance, the chief of Gorbachev’s KGB guard backed the plotters, but his 32 guards stayed loyal to the president.

(Orange County Edition) KGB ‘HEIRS’

Although the ruling Soviet State Council voted Friday to eliminate the KGB secret police, several services will replace it. They are:

An independent central intelligence service

An inter-republic counterintelligence service

A state committee to guard the Soviet Union’s borders

A foreign intelligence service, which was split off from the KGB altogether Sept. 30 by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Source: Tass news agency