KGB Successor Thwarts Illegal Export Schemes : Russia: $25 million in recovered metal and other resources nearly covers Security Ministry’s budget.

The heirs of KGB counterintelligence said Thursday they had practically covered their entire annual budget by foiling large-scale criminal schemes to spirit metals, petroleum, timber and other strategic resources out of Russia to the West.

An official of the Security Ministry called the ministry’s most successful operation yet a “graphic example” of how a successor agency to the KGB, still regarded warily by many citizens, can help secure a prosperous, law-abiding Russia.

The ministry’s action, code-named Operation Trawl, as of Thursday had stymied the illegal export of 9 million tons of metals, including almost 1,500 tons of rare earths and non-ferrous metals, and 31 tons of super-rare ores that were the basis of entire strategic industries in Russia, spokesman Andrei Chernenko said.

Chemicals worth $20 million were also blocked before they could covertly cross the border, along with loads of lumber and oil, Chernenko said, addressing a press conference in Lubyanka, the once-dreaded headquarters of the Soviet secret police.

In one particularly blatant case of wildcat capitalism, a research and development firm tried to sell the rails from a 32-mile stretch of railroad track, under the apparently approving gaze of local authorities, to an unspecified “southern state,” Chernenko said.

The Security Ministry spokesman and other officials who appeared before reporters named no names but said the primary conduit for the outflow of strategic materials ran through the Baltic states, which were joined to Russia until last fall as sister republics of the Soviet Union.

Government agencies, a “well-organized network of criminal gangs,” private entrepreneurs and state-run enterprises were all involved in the illegal export attempts, Chernenko said. He did not say whether anyone had been arrested, and he deferred answering most questions until another news conference is held.

According to the Security Ministry’s estimate, the value of the raw materials, food and other illegally shipped materials recovered by Operation Trawl was about 5 billion rubles (about $25 million), or the lion’s share of the ministry’s 6-billion-ruble ($30-million) yearly budget.

Operation Trawl was the ministry’s most spectacular success since a new law on federal security bodies in Russia was adopted July 8. The law, Chernenko told a reporter, turns the Security Ministry into “Lubyanka without the KGB”--it specifically bars agents from engaging in activities not explicitly authorized in legislation, and says they cannot obey orders from a superior if they contravene the law.

Many Russian reporters’ questions showed overt skepticism that state security agents who once prided themselves on being the “sword and shield” of the Communist Party could change their spots so quickly.

Leaders of the KGB, including its now-imprisoned chairman, Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, were among the driving figures in the failed hard-line Communist attempt to seize power in August of last year.

Chernenko said the ministry’s leadership has changed “by virtually 100%.” The law now forbids operatives to form party cells at work or follow the orders of any political group, and puts them simultaneously under the control of the Russian president, courts, legislature and state prosecutors.

The spokesman said the Security Ministry now has 135,000 salaried operatives, as well as an unspecified number of “auxiliary staff--what you call informers,” who are now being put on contract.

The new law, Chernenko said, makes information about the informers a state secret--”this situation exists in any democratic state,” he said--so the exact number of personnel involved in protecting Russian state interests at home remains as secret as the KGB’s domestic staffing once was.

Meanwhile, a separate Russian government agency handles the task of intelligence-gathering abroad.

Russian Security Ministry officials met the press in a third-floor room decorated with a wooden-framed portrait of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, the ascetic leader of the feared Cheka that V. I. Lenin’s Bolsheviks founded to liquidate their class enemies.

Did the portrait’s presence mean Russian state security is still loyal to the brutal methods of the Cheka?

“The thing is, this place is very often used for shooting films,” Chernenko explained.

“We have been getting numerous requests, backed by approvals at the highest possible level, demanding that access be given to this place for half an hour, for an hour, for filming,” he said. “Several days ago, (Josef) Stalin was sitting here, and next to him, (Lavrenti) Beria. . . . That is, the portraits are little more than props.”