THE KGB'S NEW MUSCLE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000301220032-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 15, 2012
• Sequence Number: 32
• Publication Date: September 15, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT mime' Declassified
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15 September 1986
FRAME-UP IN MOSCOW
Head spy among the power elite: In fur hat, KGB boss Viktor Chebrikov reviews troops in Red Square
THE KGB'S NEW MUSCLE
? Viktor Chebrikov is a bespectacled,
heavy-jowled, 63-year-old Russian
whose name hardly resonates outside
his own country. Viktor Chebrikov also
is one of the most powerful men in the
Soviet Union?a tough-minded bureau-
crat who runs what one Kremlinologist
calls "a kingdom within a kingdom."
His empire, the KGB, runs an army of
security-and-spy operations at home
and abroad. Its success is a matter of
some dispute: On the one hand, the
KGB has managed one of the most
damaging espionage coups against the
U.S. in anyone's memory andlias effec-
tively undermined CIA spying efforts
in the Soviet Union; on the other, its
overseas operatives still blunder, often
demonstrating how little they know
about Western values. But one thing is
certain: The agency's power is increas-
ing dramatically.
The arrest of American journalist
Nicholas Daniloff is the latest example
of the KGB's growing clout within the
Soviet leadership. But the signs of KGB
resurgence are everywhere. Chebrikov,
like Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev,
was a prot? of former Communist
Party chief Yuri Andropov's, and he
now sits as a full member of the ruling
Politburo; Moscow's Defense Minister,
in contrast, is only a candidate Member.
The KGB in recent years has defied an
international outcry and crushed the
"refusenik" and dissident movements,
jailing many of the Jews who seek to
emigrate and sending into internal exile
Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov.
More important, a spate of tough new
laws has bolstered the KGB's control
over Soviet citizenry. It is now a crime,
for instance, to put up foreigners over-
night?or even give them a ride in a car.
A vague but harsh new ban on passing
"official secrets" to a foreigner can bar
discussing virtually anything about a
Soviet citizen's work. And a 1983 stat-
ute gives labor-camp commandants the
power to extend the sentences of prison-
ers?the punishment most feared by
those serving time in the gulag:
Abroad, the KGB has unleashed a
whirlwind of spy-recruitment and tech-
nology theft. The organization's in-
creasingly brazen style outside the So-
viet Union has triggered a rash of new
spy cases and a soaring rate of expul-
sions of overseas Soviets accused of be-
ing KGB agents-135 in 1983 alone.
The KGB?its acronym stands for
Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti.
the Committee of State Security?has
more than half a million staff members
and agents, and its tentacles reach into
every corner of Soviet life. The shadowy
organization is showing more muscle at
home and abroad than at any time since
the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.
It is in the Soviet political arena that
the KGB's influence is most appar-
ent?which probably explains the orga-
nization's ability to have its way in ar-
resting Daniloff, no matter what the
diplomatic repercussions. Chebrikov
was selected to give the keynote speech
at last year's anniversary of the October
Revolution and also spoke to the Party
Congress last March?both unprece-
dented honors for a KGB boss. Instead
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of repeating the usual assurances tha
the KGB would observe legality an
party control, he spoke forcefully o
clamping down on corruption. "It was
a terribly threatening and aggressiv
speech, a way for the KGB to say to th
party, 'We're going to have an influen
tial role,'" declares Amy Knight,
Capitol Hill expert on the KGB
Some analysts think the Daniloff af-
fair may be the KGB's way of reminding
Gorbachev of its independence. Other
experts believe the KGB is in fact Gor-
bachev's chief ally in his efforts to shake
up the party structure and achieve eco-
nomic reform. Even as he consolidates
his position as party leader, he needs the
KGB in his battles against alcoholism,
corruption and social decay. Mean-
while, he can court the loyalty of other
elements in the Soviet power structure:
The military, party apparatchiks, tech-
nocrats and intellectuals. "He may not
agree with every idea the KGB pro-
duces, but he is married to the KGB if he
wants to bring his own perception of
order to the country," says Stanislav
Lev.chenko, a former KGB major who
defected to the West in 1979.
Tradition Of terror
Such reliance on a secret police is not
a Communist invention. Russia's Czars
institutionalized clandestine coercive
methods more than a century ago to
retain their grip on an oppressed soci-
ety and, later, to fight the revolutionar-
ies who eventually overthrew them.
But 1917 didn't bring an end to the
Czar's secret-police network: His suc-
cessors simply adapted it to their own
objectives. The czarist Okhrana was re-
born as Lenin's Cheka, later called the
GPU, which turned into the OGPU,
followed by the NKVD and the MGB.
It was Stalin who brought the secret
police horrifyingly into the modern era,
expanding its power and using it as a tool
of mass terror in which millions per-
ished. Inevitably, the terror force be-
came a potent political force as well?so
much so that, after Stalin died in 1953,
secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria cor-
doned Moscow with tanks and maneu-
vered for supreme power. He lost out to
rivals, who later ordered his execution.
In the aftermath, state security was
reorganized as the KGB?and de-
fanged. Nikita Khrushchev, the next
Soviet leader, further weakened the
agency during a decade of de-Staliniza-
tion. Rehabilitation of the KGB began
when Yuri Andropov took it over in
1967 during Leonid Brezhnev's reign.
Andropov upgraded the quality of the
agency's personnel and administration,
forced it back into the framework of
law, eased strong-arm thuggery and
t beefed up modern means of informa-
d tion gathering. The KGB began shed-
f ding its coarse image as bully boys in
baggy suits. With the inducements of
e salary, privilege and the opportunity
e for a bit of the good life abroad, today's
- - KGB agents, especially those stationed
a. overseas, are often urbane, well educat-
ed, socially adept?and the children of
prominent party members.
Andropov became the first KGB
boss since Beria to be appointed to the
Politburo. Then, after 15 years as the
country's chief spy, Andropov in 1982
was able to accomplish politically what
Beria had failed to do with tanks: Make
himself party chief and national leader.
In its contemporary form, the KGB is
a gargantuan bureaucracy with a struc-
ture more like that of the Pentagon than
the CIA. It embraces all the duties per-
formed in the U.S. by the CIA, the FBI,
the Secret Service, Coast Guard, Nation-
al Security Agency and the Immigration
and Naturalization Service?and has
many divisions of elite troops as well.
7
2-
Lubyanka prison on Dzerzhinaki Square housed
SCOTT r.LXE-USWINA
-r
SPY RECRUITMENT?The KGB's
global espionage effort included a
code-breaking U.S. spy ring run by
former naval officer John Walker
ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE--KGB listening
devices decorate Soviet Embassy rooftops
around the world. In Washington, antennas are
aimed at the State Department and CIA
The KGB is headquartered in the Lu-
byanka building on Dzerzhinski Square
in central Moscow?an edifice charged
with infamy as the site of executions in
the Stalinist purges. The agency has
major branches in all 15 Soviet republics.
With an annual budget of $6 billion to
$12 billion, the KGB employs 90,000
career officers supported by 150,000
technical and clerical workers. An elite,
250,000-member uniformed KGB force
patrols the country's 40,000-mile-long
frontiers with its own fleets of helicop-
ters, armored vehicles and patrol boats.
The KGB also runs think tanks special-
izing in such varied fields as computer
sciences and parapsychology. It investi-
gates major crimes, runs a vast prison
system and manages a. captive labor
force. Even the passport-control officers
greeting foreigners arriving in the Soviet
Union are KGB members.
Organizationally, the KGB is a laby-
rinth of ominous-sounding directorates
and services. The eight men who
pounced on journalist Daniloff 'were
agents of the Second Directorate?the
huge apparatus of domestic repression
that employs 70,000 to 100,000 and
touches the life of each Soviet citizen. Its
army of informers reaches into every
apartment building, office, factory and
school and is backed by a sophisticated
system of electronic surveillance.
Duties of the Fifth Directorate over-
lap the Second. Dealing with dissidence
and political crime, it was the Fifth
Directorate that subjected Sakharov,
the nuclear physicist and dissenter now
exiled in the closed city of Gorky, to
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where the Soviet Consulate closely
monitors developments in Northern
California's Silicon Valley. KGB mem-
bers are also salted into the staffs of
Aeroflot Airline offices, trade delega-
tions and Soviet news organizations.
One expert estimates that fully half of
all accredited Soviet reporters abroad
are KGB agents?which makes it hard
for the Soviets to believe Western news-
men are not also spies.
It was the First Directorate that pre-
sumably oversaw the work of Gennadi
Zakharov, the U.N.-based Soviet scien-
tist arrested in New York on August 23
while making an alleged $1,000 pay-
ment for classified documents on a U.S.
jet engine. The First Directorate also
recruits Soviet citizens to serve as "ille-
gals," agents who assume fictitious for-
eign identities?sometimes concocted
from the records of deceased persons?
to melt into the society on which they
will spy.
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DISINFORMATION?KGB forgery aims to stir up trouble between allies. A 1981
letter allegedly from President Reagan to Spain's King Juan Carlos suggested
blatant U.S. interference in Spanish affairs. Distributed to European diplomats
and journalists, the letter was quickly exposed as a hoax
months of brutal treatment that nearly
cost him his life.
Other directorates control other
parts of the population. The Third han-
dles surveillance of the Soviet military,
the Seventh watches all major embas-
sies in Moscow, the Eighth develops
cryptographic systems for codes and
code breaking, and the Ninth guards
party leaders.
But to Westerners, the KGB means
spies. And it is the First Directorate,
with its many services and subdirector-
ates, that manages KGB operations
abroad. Some 10,000 officers are in-
volved in foreign activities, 2,500 of
them stationed overseas. About 500 are
believed to be in the U.S., most under
cover of diplomatic postings in New
York, Washington and San Francisco,
intensively for several years to shed
their Russian accents and become fa-
miliar with the sports, movies and mu-
sic of their target countries. "They can
play golf and drink Scotch, and they are
very, very patient," says an FBI agent
who has conducted surveillance on
KGB agents in New York and Wash-
ington. "They know they can wait."
Directorate S also has responsibility for
sabotage and assassinations?called
"wet jobs"?as well as terrorist training
at its Balashikha complex 15 miles out-
side of Moscow.
The same directorate recruits Ameri-
cans for spying. The John Walker-Jerry
Whitworth spy ring, exposed in 1985,
netted the Soviets 1 million documents
on U.S. naval codes and submarine op-
erations, according to the FBI. It was
the most serious security breach in U.S.
history. One illegal posing as a legiti-
mate immigrant, Svetlana Ogorodni-
kova, recruited her lover, FBI agent
Richard Miller, to obtain classified
documents. He was sentenced to two
life terms plus 50 years last July.
T for technology
But the rising star of the foreign-
espionage department is Directorate T,
char ed with scientific intelligence.__..
gatenng ?reign tec no ogy y ega or
illegal means. Technology theft has dis-
placed political and conventional mili-
tary espionage as the No. I .goal overseas.
"Gaining access to our advanced tech-
nology continues to be their top priori-
ty," says CIA Director William Casey.
Without Western technology, the So-
viet Union would fall even further be-
hind in weapons development, computer
science and space exploration. Soviet spy
successes have yielded designs for the
NATO Leopard tank, the joint Europe-
an Tornado jet fighter and, some officials
say, plans for the U.S. space shuttle, the
Soviet version of which will be a carbon
copy. "Soviet scientific collection orders
have targeted dozens of American firms
and over 60 universities," reports a CIA
study prepared last fall. The prime tar-
gets: Most major aerospace compa-
nies?all likely to be involved in research
for President Reagan's Star Wars Strate-
gic Defense Initiative.
It is not only in the U.S. that high tech
is pursued. Former West German intelli-
gence chief Heribert Hellenbroich con-
tends that the KGB has sharpened its
focus on Europe so much that "industri-
al espionage has taken an overwhelming
role." In France, the man fingered by
security forces as the KGB's station
chief, Vladislav Nitchkov, works under
cover as the embassy's science-and-tech-
nology counselor, giving him entree into
academic and industrial circles. The
leaking of a dossier detailing Soviet tech-
nological espionage led to the expulsion
of 47 KGB agents from Paris in 1983.
In Japan, called a "spy paradise" be-
cause the outright purchase of technolo-
gy seems so easy, half of the estimated 40
agents in the Soviet Embassy are thought
to focus on stealing semiconductor blue-
prints, optical-fiber information and the
latest research into ceramics.
In the U.S., the KGB is equally skill-
ful at exploiting an open society. It
legally gathers information about the
economy, public utilities, agriculture
and politics?as well as about individ-
ual citizens. The FBI, which oversees
counterintelligence, estimates that 90
percent of the KGB's intelligence
comes from open sources, beginning
with each day's New York Times and
C4ntinued
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Washington Post. Soviet agents comb
the Library of Congress, subscribe to
hundreds of technical magazines and
go to high-tech trade shows. In late
August, a visitor appeared at a booth at
the American Political Science_ Associ-
ation convention in Washington, D.C.,
and ordered a $50 book entitled U.S.-
R.O.K. Combined Operations: A Kore-
an Perspective. The unclassified volume
contains a detailed analysis of potential
military threats to troops in South Ko-
rea. The name on the order form: Vla-
dimir 0. Rakhmanin, third secretary,
Soviet Embassy.
Dealing in disinformation
The KGB has also stepped up what
are called "active measures" in recent
years. These include organizing demon-
strations, establishing front organiza-
tions, fostering ill will with forged let-
ters and articles and other types of
disinformation. CIA Deputy Director
rRob_ert _Gat?eiTestimated last year that
the Soviets spend 53 to $4 billion annu-
alfz on these sorts of overt and covert
activities. In the late 1970s, for example,
Moscow launched a campaign to whip
up opposition in Europe to U.S. plans
for a neutron bomb; President Carter
sqlsequently shelved the protect.
A number of Soviet forgeries and false
news stories have been exposed in recent
years, often because of clumsy execu-
tion. An article alleging U.S. complieity
in spreading the AIDS virus to Third
World nations was "reprinted" in the
Soviet literary magazine Literaturnaya
Gazeta before the KGB remembered to
plant it in India's New Delhi Patriot.
Days after the Chernobyl nuclear di-
saster, several reporters received copies
of a letter supposedly from a high U.S.
Information Agency official to Senator
David Durenberger (R.-Minn.), chair-
man of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence. It boldly recommended
that Durenberger exploit the disaster for
propaganda by spreading exaggerated
claims of death and damage?an evident
attempt to discredit the USIA official.
Reporters called U.S. officials, who
termed the letter a Soviet-inspired fake.
Heavy-handedness still underlies the
smooth veneer of the new KGB, as
correspondent Daniloff himself noted
in his last dispatch on the KGB three
months before his arrest: "KGB agents
are, at least initially, polite and correct.
However, they are not above planting
evidence or organizing entrapments to
get their man."
by Peter Ross Range with Miriam Horn, Charles
Fenyyesi, Steven Emerson, David Whitman. Dennis
- Mullin and James M. Hildreth in Washington and
reports from the magazine's foreign bureaus
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