The Spies Who’ve Come In for the Gold : * Media: Some retired KGB operatives have acquired a West Hollywood agent to help them peddle stories of their Cold War exploits to the studios.

As of Wednesday, KGB agents have an agent of their own--in West Hollywood.

One of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Soviet contacts, an undercover diplomat code-named “Yakovlev,” who says he helped steal U.S. atom bomb blueprints, and other retired intelligence operatives having trouble making do on their inflation-ravaged pensions are ready to tell their secrets to the world, courtesy of a U.S. entertainment firm.

“We are selling historical information,” said Col. Anatoly P. Privalov, vice chairman of a fraternal association of retirees from the former Soviet secret service, the Foreign Intelligence Veterans Assn., and a former intelligence operative in Turkey and Algeria. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t get any money.”

Turning their undercover past into an over-the-counter asset in hopes of cashing in on the New World Order, officers of the 500-member association have agreed to work with Brian D. Litman, president and chief executive of ECHO, an entertainment and communications firm, to sell their stories.

Litman, a nattily tailored man, said Wednesday afternoon that he has developed “remarkably rewarding relations with (these) people who are very much responsible for shaping the history of the world during the Cold War, and bringing the world to where it is now.”

The 37-year-old Litman is just the latest entrepreneur to announce a deal for KGB stories. In recent months, as the Soviet Union unraveled, two major Hollywood entertainment companies announced that they had obtained “exclusive” rights to make TV movies based on KGB files. RHI Entertainment Inc., headed by producer Robert Halmi, and Century City-based Davis Entertainment Television, underwritten by former 20th Century Fox owner Marvin Davis, both claimed they had obtained exclusive access to KGB files. And late last year, ABC’s “Nightline” broadcast what it described as exclusive KGB files on Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Litman said his firm wants to create “entertainment,” including films and TV programs, books and lectures on spycraft, in which the Russians can rightfully boast of many coups, including cracking the U.S. Manhattan Project that developed the atom bomb during World War II and running highly placed spies inside British intelligence. But he said he is not interested in serving as a KGB “apologist.”

As Litman spoke at a news conference along with former Soviet agents who had devoted a total of more than 150 years of their lives to spying for the Kremlin, it was obvious the venture was only in its embryonic stages.

Moreover, the four KGB retirees who put on coats and ties and came to the “Blue Hall” of the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper were close-mouthed about what cloak-and-dagger tales they might bear. The largely Western audience had expected to hear some provocative tidbits.

For example, “Yakovlev,” whose real name is Anatoly A. Yatskov, and who retired from the KGB in 1985, was repeatedly asked if Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 on a conviction of wartime espionage, had in fact helped obtain plans for the U.S. atom bomb for the Soviets.

“I don’t want to go into individuals,” the man in his mid-60s with graying, wavy hair retorted--and stubbornly didn’t.

Later, Yatskov, who said he had served as a low-level employee from 1941-46 at the Soviet Consulate General in New York City at 7 E. 61st St., across from the Pierre Hotel, said he had never met the Rosenbergs.

White-bearded and wearing a bright red sweater, Col. Oleg M. Nechiporenko--”My specialty was Latin America”--said he met with Lee Harvey Oswald at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City on Sept. 27-28, 1963, two months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. They spoke English, interlaced with some Russian, said Nechiporenko, who had already appeared before Moscow-based reporters in January.

A book on Oswald that he is now writing will “shed new light” on Oswald, Nechiporenko promised, and also refute allegations that the former U.S. Marine, who lived for a time in the Soviet Union, was a Kremlin agent.

But he wouldn’t say more. “It’s obvious that it’s in my interest to be silent until the book is issued,” he noted.

At first, Nechiporenko said he sided with director Oliver Stone’s thesis in the movie “JFK,” then acknowledged he hadn’t seen the film. But he said the film was based upon a “very serious investigation” by former New Orleans Dist. Atty. Jim Garrison, who maintained the assassination resulted from a conspiracy.

When Kennedy was slain, Nechiporenko said, he was just as surprised as anybody else.

In a society that is emerging from decades of official disinformation, corroborating the word of former KGB operatives could be difficult, perhaps impossible. Privalov, the vice chairman of the retired officers association, even said at one point that the major criterion the ex-KGB officials will use to choose their revelations is: “Is it good for intelligence?”

The chairman of the Foreign Veterans Assn., Gen. Vladilen N. Fyodorov, said in a statement that the chief of Russia’s Central Intelligence Service, Yevgeny M. Primakov, has given his blessing to the deal.

Other projects “in development,” according to the statement, include a TV miniseries on U.S. Navy spy and defector Glenn Michael Souther, who committed suicide in Moscow; docudramas on events such as the assassination of Kremlin exile Leon Trotsky, and a documentary on Soviet femmes fatales in espionage.

Litman wouldn’t talk about what cut of any proceeds his firm will take. At any rate, it was obvious that his Russian associates, whose country is now in the grips of economic chaos, were hoping for a comfortable return.

Without it, “Yakovlev,” for example, faces an anticipated pension income of around 2,000 rubles a month, only about $20 at the customary exchange rate.

On such money “you don’t die, but you don’t get fat either,” he said.

“Yakovlev,” who said he saw plenty of Westerns and other Hollywood productions during his tour as a diplomat in New York, expressed confidence that the KGB retirees won’t end up as the bad guys in any creative works that might spring from their revelations. What he did as a spy, he said, was not meant to hurt Americans, but to help the now defunct Soviet Union.

“I don’t think they’ll turn us into Indians or fascists,” he said.

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Clarification: Davis Entertainment Television is headed by John Davis, son of Marvin Davis.

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