COLUMN ONE : ‘New’ KGB: On Top or on Skids? : Russia’s revamped spy agencies suffer from slashed budgets, poor morale and a dizzying identity crisis. But the CIA ‘mole’ case raises questions about just how bad things really are.

As the American intelligence community tallies the damage done by the Aldrich Ames espionage affair, it also will try to answer another question: Just how good is the new, “reformed” KGB?

Allegations that the Kremlin had a high-level “mole” inside the CIA--and that Russian counterintelligence has rooted out a Russian defense plant executive spying for Britain--are certain to raise new fears about the reach and activities of Russian intelligence.

Ironically, the spy-versus-spy fervor comes at a time when the old KGB has been abolished and the two intelligence services that succeeded it appear to be in disarray, racked by budget crises, a 30% cut in staff, wrenching reorganization, an embittering loss of prestige and a disorienting change in mission since the Cold War’s end.

The arrest of CIA official Ames, charged with spying for Moscow in exchange for more than $2.5 million, has prompted cynical spy-watchers to ask: How did the Russians afford it?

“It was a surprise to discover that they still had enough money to buy Jaguars for their agents,” said Christopher Andrew, a historian specializing in espionage at Cambridge University.

Ames allegedly was recruited in 1985, when the Soviet Union was richer and intensely anxious about the Ronald Reagan Administration’s military buildup. It was not until 1991 that Ames’ profligate spending, including a $25,000 down payment on a Jaguar sedan, reportedly drew American authorities’ attention to him.

Outraged U.S. officials believe that Ames may have given Russian intelligence lethal information about the identities of American agents and operating procedures. But if Ames is a turncoat, he may be among the last of a breed that will be difficult to replace.

Russian sources today paint a portrait of a tamer, poorer and far more disorganized intelligence network that poses a greatly reduced threat to the United States.

“Financial difficulties, political confusion, the complete lack of guidance from the political leadership as to what are the most crucial areas--all of this has been extremely detrimental to the intelligence community,” said Alexei G. Arbatov, a national security analyst at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow.

Russian intelligence today “might continue some operations, but clearly they would be on a much, much smaller scale than previously,” Arbatov said.

Even the old KGB was financed on such a shoestring that its overseas “residents,” or spy station chiefs, were reportedly permitted to spend no more than $300 without approval from Moscow.

Now, the money crunch is so severe that employees of the Foreign Intelligence Service, the KGB successor agency that would have supervised Ames, do not have access to personal computers and must share typewriters, according to the New Daily, a feisty new Moscow newspaper. In an expose last week, it documented the disarray in Russian intelligence.

A paper shortage has forced agents to type reports on the backs of old documents. Their offices can no longer afford subscriptions even to Russian newspapers and magazines, let alone foreign periodicals, the paper said.

A spokesman for the Federal Counterintelligence Service, the other half of the former KGB, confirmed in an interview that his agency also has not been allocated money for subscriptions this year. Even so, he said, money would be found to reward an especially well-placed source. “In case we need additional money to pay valuable agents, we may apply directly to the president,” said the spokesman, Sergei P. Bogdanov.

The Soviet Union always had great difficulty recruiting American agents. KGB documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union by defector Oleg Gordievsky show that KGB bosses repeatedly reprimanded subordinates for an “unacceptably low standard” of recruitment, Andrew said.

Gordievsky escaped from Russia in 1985. The last complaint he smuggled out is dated February of that year. Ames is alleged to have been recruited in May, 1985. But Andrew said Western scholars have no documents after that date to indicate whether the KGB was satisfied with the information it was allegedly getting from Ames.

After working undetected as a double agent for the British for 11 years, Gordievsky was fingered at precisely the time when Ames was allegedly recruited. “I have no proof that Ames was responsible, but the fit is a striking one,” Andrew said.

If the Soviets had problems snagging Americans, Russia is finding the task even tougher, said the New Daily article, which was based on interviews with 10 unnamed agents.

Because money was short and agents motivated by lucre tend to be unreliable, most Soviet foreign agents came in two types: idealists who wished to help the socialist workers’ state; and anti-American activists, usually in the Third World, who sought to counter U.S. “hegemonic” intent toward their countries.

Agents who wanted to build communism have lost interest now that Russia has embraced capitalism and is defending its own national interests, not the workers of the world.

“Not one of these people--and some of them had cooperated with us for 20 years--would work for the idea of a Great Russia,’ ” the article said.

Viktor V. Ivanenko, former head of the Security Ministry, said in an interview Monday, “Of course, it is getting increasingly costly to recruit agents now that the intelligence service has to rely mostly on material incentives, with the old ideological dogmas forgotten and forsaken. But we still can play on universal human values--on the natural resistance to American egotism.”

However, Jeffrey Richelson, a Washington-based expert on intelligence, said that in recent years none of the Americans spying for Moscow has been ideologically motivated. They either wanted money or to settle a grudge.

In some cases, the Soviets got priceless secrets for a pittance. In 1978, the KGB paid former CIA employee William Kampites just $3,000 for the manual to a KH-11 “keyhole” satellite, for which the Soviets would likely have shelled out vastly more, Richelson said.

Ivanenko said agents are finding sources of financing that would have been heresy in Soviet times. In some places, operatives are allowed to open businesses--to provide a better cover and to raise money, he said.

But it’s not only foreigners that are proving difficult to recruit. Most bright, multilingual Russian graduates from elite universities would rather land a job at IBM than in the supposedly reformed KGB. The number of students at the Andropov Red Banner Institute, which trains intelligence staff, has dropped from 300 to about 50; the students are no longer Russia’s best and brightest, the New Daily said.

After purges, attrition and two chaotic reorganizations, the Foreign Intelligence Service (known to the CIA as the SVRR), and the Federal Counterintelligence Service (SVR), have about one-third fewer employees than the old KGB, Russian officials have said.

The counterintelligence agency says it has slashed its work force from 137,000 to a still-enormous 75,000. There are no comparable estimates for the Foreign Intelligence Agency, which handles intelligence gathering outside of Russia, including in the former Soviet republics.

Conservative analyst J. Michael Waller, director of the International Freedom Foundation in Washington, argues that the KGB may have become leaner but remains just as mean.

“The whole KGB, like the entire Soviet bureaucracy, was bloated with a lot of do-nothing personnel,” Waller said. He added that the Foreign Intelligence Service remains “world class.” Moreover, he argues, despite all the talk about the “reformed” KGB, Russia’s civilian government does not fully control the intelligence services.

Many former KGB leaders were purged after the August, 1991, attempt to overthrow Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. But KGB veterans continued to dominate when the agency was turned into the Russian Security Ministry later that year. In December, President Boris N. Yeltsin abolished the Security Ministry and split its functions between the two new agencies, the SVR and the SVRR.

“The system of the organs of the VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-KGB-MB turned out to be unreformable,” Yeltsin said in a harshly worded decree that spelled out all the acronyms by which the secret police have been known since Bolshevik days.

All employees were ordered to undergo a recertification process that was widely interpreted as a license to purge. On Wednesday, the just-fired head of the counterintelligence agency, Nikolai M. Golushko, said that of the 250 senior officers who have undergone recertification procedures since December, 14 had failed to qualify.

Some people fled the old KGB as soon as they could do so without political repercussions. Insiders complain that many of the very best--skilled intelligence analysts, linguists, computer and communications experts--have found more lucrative jobs elsewhere.

Besides losing massive numbers of personnel, Russia has closed 30 overseas listening posts. Its once-massive agent network in Eastern Europe has been gutted.

Some say all of these factors have affected the quality of the daily intelligence briefing that appears on Yeltsin’s desk each morning. “Only the Lord knows what garbage we are sending them,” one SVRR source told New Daily. “But they swallow it all.”

Waller is skeptical. Russia hasn’t said which overseas spy stations it closed, and it could have abandoned that many in strategically unimportant Third World countries where the KGB’s main job was to promote local Communist parties, he said.

Russian officials insist the infamous old KGB is no more. Russian intelligence is now forbidden to use “substances damaging to human health”--presumably the poisoned umbrellas and truth serums of old--as well as to blackmail people into cooperation.

Besides catching foreign spies, the counterintelligence agency handles counterterrorism, drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, smuggling of radioactive materials and even prevention of industrial accidents, Bogdanov said. A report of shoddy maintenance on an aircraft led to an engine being replaced, preventing a near-certain crash, he said.

Like nearly every other Russian intelligence official interviewed in recent months, Bogdanov complained of a marked escalation of Western intelligence gathering inside Russia and in the other former republics since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Broke or not, as long as Russian intelligence believes the West is trying to take advantage of its new vulnerability, the spy game will go on.

Andrei Ostroukh of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.