GORBACHEV'S KGB CRISIS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000100440026-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 28, 2011
• Sequence Number: 26
• Publication Date: September 23, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ST"Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/28: CIA-
ARTICLE APB?ED
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WASHINGTON TIMES
23 September 1985
Gorbacheds KGFs cns~s
ARNOLD BEICHMAN
For some observers, Mikhail
Gorbachev's big problem is
the failure of the economy
and central planning. For
others, it is the urban work force and
its abysmally low productivity,
expressed in the words of a Mus-
covite, "They [the government] pre-
tend to pay us and we pretend to
work."
Or his big problem is President
Reagan and the United States. Or
asserting control over the
bureaucracy and the military. Or the
low birth-rate in the Russian sector
of the population. Or dragging an
industrial state into the age of the
computer. Or the restive Soviet
nationalities. Or the even more rest-
ive East European satellites. Or
Comunist China. Or Afghanistan. Or.
Or. Or.
For this observer, Mr. Gorbac-
hev's big problem - as it has been
for every Soviet Numero Uno,
starting with Stalin - is one to which
he must now be devoting as much
time as he is to trying?to stymie Pres-
ident Reagan's Strategic Defense
Initiative: how to control the secret
police, the Soviet KGB, how to pre-
vent it from becoming an imperium
in imperio, a state within a state.
Stalin ran the secret police by a
simple strategy. Anytime a secret
police chief became too useful to
him, he had him executed and
another one put in his place. Stalin
was always fearful that the police,
necessarily operating in secrecy,
would in time monopolize power
over state and party and thereby
become independent of him. Stalin
used similar terroristic techniques
to prevent the rise of combinations
against him.
The Soviet Numero Uno who
failed to follow Stalin's techniques
was Nikita Khrushchev. Even
though he had been the ranking
Politburocrat since 1957, he was
blind-sided by a Politburo conspir-
acy, headed by Leonid Brezhnev,
which ousted him from power on
Oct. 12,1964. What became apparent
immediately after the coup was that
Mr. Brezhnev's power over the
secret police during a time when he
was nominally subordinate to Mr
Khrushchev was in fact greater than
that of his patron. Mr. Khrushchev
obviously didn't know a thing about
the conspiracy until his return from
a holiday direct to a Politburo meet-
ing, where he learned his reign was
over.
The Soviet secret police chief who
missed his golden opportunity to
reach the top was Lavrenti Beria. He
was executed in 1953 by his fellow
Politburocrats shortly after Stalin's
death in March of that year. They
were fearful that with Stalin gone,
Mr. Beria, a Georgian like Stalin,
would use his now uncontrolled
power of the secret police to con-
tinue the same line of talented activ-
ity he had exhibited while
performing as Stalin's executioner.
Mr. Beria was the first secret police
head to be a full member of the Polit-
buro.
On the face of it, the only
achievement of Yuri Andropov
which history will record is that he
was the first chief of the secret
police to make it to the top. Like Mr.
Beria, Mr. Andropov became the
second KGB chairman to be a full
Politburo member.
The accession of Mr. Andropov,
Mr. Brezhnev's successor, to the
ranking post of Communist Party
general secretary, was a demonstra-
tion of his power against that of the
Politburocrats. Their agreement,
willing or not, to accept as party
chief the former head of the KGB
showed how important this kind of
background had become to the inner
establishment of the Soviet Union.
The present KGB chief is Viktor
Mihailovich Chebrikov, 62. He is not
Mr. Gorbachev's appointee to the
post, but Mr. Andropov's. Mr. Cheb-
rikov became chairman, U.S.S.R.
Committee for State Security (KGB)
Dec. 17, 1982, following Mr. Andro-
pov's triumph of Nov 15, 1982. Mr.
Gorbachev became party general
secretary March 11 this year. On
April 23, Mr. Chebrikov was elected
to the Politburo. There is now ample
precedent for the KGB chairman to
become a full member of the Polit-
buro of the Central Committee of the
CPSU.
In other words, the man who han-
dles the dossiers, the man who can
spy on his comrades, tap their tele-
phones (Tito fired his secret police
chief, Alexander Rankovich, when
Tito discovered he was being wire-
tapped), plant KGB informants in
their retinues, and avail himself of
the most modern means of scientific
espionage sits legitimately as more
than an equal to other Politburo
members. By definition, he knows
more than they do; he literally knows
where the bodies are buried.
The arrival of a new Soviet party
chairman always creates a crisis
sometimes v is e. as present v
sometimes not in the command
Posts Or Soviet intelligence. And
ere is suc a crisis in the KGB
today A new Soviet leader means
realignment of KGB power-lines
demotions, promotions defections.
Why, in the few months since Mr.
Gorbachev reached the top, should
there have been the defection of a
KGB station chief in Britain? Why
should there have been suddenly,
almost overnight, the self-exposure
in Germany of one of the most suc-
cessful anti-NATO, anti-West espi-
onage rings in postwar history? Did
the Soviet agents in the German gov-
ernment offices come up for retire-
ment pensions after 20 years of
service?
Or are there other reasons for
what appears to be a breakup of a
Soviet espionage center, one whose
achievements can be compared to
the brilliant intelligence work of
Stalin's Richard Sorge ring in pre-
war Japan?
In a totalitarian society like the
U.S.S.R., suspicion and mistrust
among the men on top is an inevi-
table and incurable malady. The his-
tory of Stalin's sanguinary purges
against party leaders, the fall of
such powerful Politburocrats as Mr.
Beria, Georgi Malenkov, V.M. Molo-
toy, Mr. Kaganovich, Alexander
Shelepin, and Mr. Khrushchev, the
recent disappearance of Grigoriy
Romanov at the hands of Mr. Gorba-
Continued
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chev, all these events and more dem-
onstrate how difficult it is to survive
in this tempest-tossed ocean of
totalitarianism.
And since the regime's existence,
party and state, must depend upon
force and cultivation of mistrust
among the regime's victims, there is
a sickness which occasionally
becomes visible, like the sudden
explosion of superhot lava from a
hidden volcano. That sickness shows
itself in the upper echelons of the
police who guarantee the existence
of the police state.
To put it at its simplest = in
Lenin's famous formula - kto, kgo?
Who rules whom? Why should Mr.
Gorbachev trust the KGB's Mr.
Chebrikov? Why should KGB agents
in the field trust the new team in the
Kremlin when they learn that their
onetime protectors have been
removed, demoted, transferred, or
have died accidentally?
We have only seen the first events
of what should be studied as a major
crisis in the KGB. Either Mr. Gorba-
chev will take control of the police
into his own hands or he will not
endure.
It is my judgment that the sudden
burst of espionage-itis in the United
States, Britain, Germany, and
France can be attributed to a
struggle for power under way in the
KGB and, secondarily, in the Soviet
military intelligence agency, the
GRU. The events in the West are
merely the visible manifestations of
that struggle.
2,
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100440026-8