Coup Planned Months Ahead, KGB Aide Says

Plotters in the KGB began drawing up plans for August’s failed coup a full nine months beforehand, and former chairman Vladimir A. Kryuchkov played “a leading role,” a top official of the security agency disclosed Friday at the conclusion of an internal investigation.

Deputy KGB Chairman Anatoly Aleinikov told reporters that Kryuchkov, who is now awaiting trial on treason charges, “prepared this event, this transition to methods of force, beforehand, from the end of last year.”

Aleinikov’s report, coming amid the dismantling of the KGB in the wake of its active involvement in the putsch, constituted the agency’s clearest admission to date that it was largely the driving force behind the failed coup.

Aleinikov, who headed the KGB’s internal investigation, said that Kryuchkov “had a broad grasp of the world, but, to put it crudely, he got hung up on certain things, he got fixated on methods of force, on methods used by politicians of times long ago. That was his credo, and that credo brought him to such a sad, tragic end.”

He also accused Kryuchkov of prolonging the Soviet Union’s fruitless involvement in Afghanistan by passing false information to the government and of instigating last January’s bloody crackdown in Lithuania.

Aleinikov, who was appointed to his position after the coup, said the investigation showed that during the coup KGB leaders performed three main functions: They isolated President Mikhail S. Gorbachev at his Crimean dacha; they tried to take over the headquarters of the Russian Federation government, and they sought to control or detain leaders of democratic movements.

They failed, he said, because they did not realize that a majority of KGB workers had come to believe in democratic change and would not obey illegal orders.

“In Kryuchkov’s actions,” Aleinikov said, “you can see the tendency to lean on a very narrow group of people, whom he depended on and trusted and who prepared all these events.”

Five of the 14 former Soviet officials under arrest for their roles in the aborted coup are KGB leaders, including Kryuchkov, two deputy chairmen and two of the officers who led Gorbachev’s guard and imposed isolation on the Soviet leader during the coup.

Aleinikov said that an additional five or six people could be arrested as a result of the internal investigation.

The plans that Kryuchkov and his minions had prepared “were very detailed,” Aleinikov said. “It was all worked out, whom to grab, preparations were made, there was illegal phone tapping and secret observation. . . . There was a plan of action, in Moscow and elsewhere, but only part of the leadership really knew what was going on.”

Despite warnings from former Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who quit in December saying that dictatorship threatened, and from other progressive politicians, too few people knew of the concrete coup plans to be able to thwart them, Aleinikov said.

The plotters laid their groundwork, he said, by pushing through a bill on states of emergency, the legal cover for the harsh regime they planned.

They were motivated, he added, not by any particular event in 1990 but by “the development of democratic forces and the loss of the real power that KGB men had enjoyed.”

Aside from those facing trial, all the KGB officials who aided the coup have been fired, Aleinikov said, and the massive reorganization of the agency is proceeding apace.

The Soviet government decreed this month that the KGB no longer exists as such, and is parceling out its functions to three new, separate arms--an intelligence service, a counterintelligence force and the border guards.

But the tens of thousands of KGB professionals will not be fired wholesale as happened to their counterparts in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, Aleinikov said, and their experience will be used to fight terrorism and crime.

“We’ll do this in a civilized manner,” he said.