Spymaster Was King for a Day

Deep in the catacombs of Moscow’s Dynamo Stadium, in a small office that is dimly lit and eerily quiet, former KGB officers still come to pay their respects to the Soviet Union’s last spymaster.

Leonid Shebarshin’s business card now reads, “Russian National Economic Security Service,” a private security firm through which he is trying to make his way in the new crime-anxious Russia. But that hardly does justice to his less-formal role as the center of gravity for a network of frustrated KGB alumni who have spread into the private sector of Russia: a post-Cold War diaspora of spies.

As these once-feared men of the KGB join the daily struggle for money and position, it is Shebarshin to whom they turn when they need to find their bearings.

Above all, they rely on Shebarshin as the guardian of the KGB’s institutional memory, its tradition and--dare they say it?--its pride. “After you have spent as much as a quarter of a century in a certain service, you come to like it, you come to love it, you come to cherish it,” Shebarshin says.

It’s no coincidence that Shebarshin has set up his offices at Dynamo, a sporting society established by KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, a club that for decades fielded international sports teams sponsored by the KGB.

“A way of life, which is easily criticized now, had its very good sides,” Shebarshin insists in a rare interview with an American newspaper. “Not only for us, the KGB officers, but for the ordinary Russian. Good things and bad things went down the drain.”

Shebarshin seems an unlikely candidate to be the keeper of the KGB’s flame; he was, after all, the man who was at the helm at the ignominious end. He served as KGB chief for only one day, late in 1991, when everything was falling apart.

It was in the years just before the collapse, when Shebarshin led the First Directorate, the elite branch of the KGB that handled foreign espionage, that he earned his reputation among his colleagues inside the KGB.

It was from Yasenovo, the First Directorate’s headquarters on the outskirts of Moscow, that Shebarshin tried in vain to hold his intelligence service together in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And it was from Yasenovo that he played his critical--and largely unknown--role in the Soviet Union’s finale, the failed coup of August 1991.

After managing Moscow’s intelligence operations in Afghanistan, Shebarshin was named chief of the First Directorate in February 1989, just as Soviet troops were withdrawing from the Afghan quagmire and the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe was beginning to collapse.

Shebarshin quickly found himself immersed in a daily struggle to shore up the First Directorate’s plunging morale, which was being fed by a growing sense that the Soviet Union itself could not long survive the political turmoil.

“Everything started to crumble,” recalls Shebarshin bitterly. “Not only the KGB; the state was crumbling, authority was crumbling; the party was crumbling; our way of life was crumbling . . . and our organization was coming under very heavy attack from the so-called democrats. It is very pleasant to have a giant tightly bound. You can pinprick it, and you can expose it, and we had to beat back all of these effects.”

Shebarshin still had one ace up his sleeve--CIA turncoat Aldrich H. Ames was continuing to spy on behalf of the KGB--but defections and espionage betrayals by KGB officers had become so rampant that Shebarshin knew he had to reform the intelligence service in a hurry if he hoped to stave off its demise.

“Our colleagues [at the CIA] were giving us a lot of trouble,” he says. “Practically every week there were reports of recruitment approaches to KGB officers [by the CIA], and some of them, I’m afraid, were successful.”

Shebarshin responded with a quick fix that would sound familiar to many American corporate managers: He tried to make life inside the KGB more bearable, lightening the pressure on the rank and file.

But the pace of reform was glacial. Shebarshin didn’t introduce casual Fridays; he did try, however, to eliminate old demands for ideological purity. He knew that Soviet agitprop had lost all meaning, even for the KGB officers who were the sword and shield of the empire.

“Ideological motivation was more or less the formal basis for organizations in the Soviet Union. If you were in a group, you had to behave by the dictates of Communist slogans, and so on and so on. . . . But it was only a formality.”

So he began to send subtle signals to his officers that they were fighting not for Marxism-Leninism but Mother Russia and the First Directorate. He was trying to instill a new esprit de corps.

“You try somehow to improve the whole system of incentives,” explains Shebarshin. “I wanted a sense of camaraderie, a sense of belonging to the same corporation.”

Shebarshin told managers at the KGB to try to reinvigorate their subordinates by emphasizing “dedication to the service, dedication to your country, which is what is called patriotism. That was a real thing, a real motivation. How to preserve those things? I could not do that by any formal orders.”

Instead, he told managers that the organization had to become more flexible in order to focus on “those things that were dangers to our way of life and our service.” He asked that supervisors “do away with unnecessary formalities for all personnel. Not to make their lives easier, but to show them the real purpose of our work, the real purpose of the service; to show them that, yes, we were going through a very difficult time in our history, but it was not for the first time. And by the dedicated efforts of people like ourselves, our country had survived a great deal. It was our patriotic and our service duty to do our jobs.”

But nothing worked. “An organization like ours,” he said, “could only be effective if it was backed up with political will by the leadership of the nation.”

The August 1991 coup attempt by a group of Communist hard-liners, including Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former chief of the First Directorate who had been promoted to run the entire KGB, found Shebarshin in a state of deep despair, willing to do what he could to help the coup succeed.

On Aug. 19, when the coup began, Kryuchkov asked Shebarshin to put the First Directorate at his disposal, and Shebarshin readily complied. He immediately ordered his intelligence officers to begin to spy on Moscow.

“I was reporting to [Kryuchkov] certain observations,” Shebarshin says. “We had our people all over the city, and they were reporting to me, and I would try somehow to feed information to him.”

Next, Shebarshin ordered the First Directorate’s paramilitary unit to the KGB’s central club in Moscow to stand by for orders to quash the opposition coalescing around Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin. The First Directorate’s unit was separate from the KGB’s larger and better known paramilitary force, Alpha Group, which had also been put on alert.

But then came an odd silence; Kryuchkov stopped calling. Shebarshin waited at Yasenovo for the word to move, but it never came. “I never got any directions. . . ,” he says. Kryuchkov “didn’t order me to do anything.”

As the coup began to collapse, Shebarshin told the commanding officer of the First Directorate’s paramilitary force not to accept orders from anyone else but him. Calculating that the coup was about to fail, he decided that he would no longer obey Kryuchkov.

“It became very clear that something was wrong with this emergency committee [the coup leaders],” Shebarshin says. “There was a lack of will, a lack of direction. So we decided after the first impulse to stay back and to see how the wheel would turn.”

Chillingly, Shebarshin acknowledges that if the orders for aggressive action had come at the outset of the coup, “definitely, I would have obeyed.” He adds that if the plotters had used the levers of power at their disposal on the first day, “they would have succeeded, no doubt about it.”

The coup’s failure ended Shebarshin’s career. Three weeks later--after spending one day as Kryuchkov’s replacement as chief of the entire KGB--he was forced out of office in favor of reformers who would break up the KGB and its political power.

But while the attempted coup cost Shebarshin the position and status for which he still yearns today, it is clear that his only complaint is with its poor execution.

“A coup that fails,” shrugs Shebarshin, “is an adventure.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

About This Series

Once it was the world’s most mysterious and feared espionage organization, the “sword and shield” of the Soviet Union. But ultimately the KGB fell victim to the same forces of history that destroyed the empire it had served.

For the most part, the last KGB officers slipped away, retaining the cloak of secrecy. But now a group of former officers has stepped forward to provide an insider’s guide. They agreed to a series of interviews with the Los Angeles Times, in part to put on the record what they see as their sacrifices and professionalism in a cause now widely denigrated.

* Monday: The spy who directed Aldrich H. Ames.

* Tuesday: Two enemies, two friends.

* Today: The Gavrilov channel, the KGB-CIA hotline.

* On the Web: The complete series is available on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/kgb