YURI ANDROPOV

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000100450002-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 13, 2007
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: November 13, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2011/02/23: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100450002-4
RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
All Things Considered STATION WETA Radio
NPR Network
DATE November 13, 1982 5:00 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
Yuri Andropov
LEE THORNTON: Yesterday, just as it was announced that
Lech Walesa would go free, the Central Committee of the Soviet
Communist party selected a new General Secretary. He is Yuri
Andropov, former head of the KGB, the Soviet secret police.
British journalist Margaret Jay has been working for six
months on a documentary about Andropov. Even so, she says, it's
difficult to predict what kind of leader he will be.
MARGARET JAY: I think we can only hazard a guess. I
think it is fairly clear that there's been a fairly systematic
effort by people to, as it were, launder his reputation, to make
sure that people in America, in Western Europe don't think of
this person as just another kind of terror chief, another ex-head
of the KGB, perhaps with blood on his hands, who's suddenly
become a political ruler.
THORNTON: Andropov has never set foot in the West. I
find that interesting, for all of the picture being built of a
sophisticate and clever politician.
JAY: Well, I think you must remember that compared with
many of the Soviet leaders, he has had pretty much a lot of
experience in Eastern Europe. He was Ambassador to Hungary
during that rather notorious period when the Budapest rioting
took place. He has had responsibilities for the Eastern European
bloc countries, the Poles and so on, for a ten-year period when
he was head of that section of the Communist Party Central
Committee. So that in that sense, he has had more experience of
being abroad, althought it's, as it were, within the closed
system of the Soviet society.
OFFICES IN: WASHINGTON D.C. ? NEW YORK ? LOS ANGELES ? CHICAGO ? DETROIT ? AND OTHER PRINCIPAL CITIES
Material supplied by Radio N Reports, Inc. may be used for file and reference purposes only. It may not be reproduced, sold or publicly demonstrated or exhibited.
Approved For Release 2011/02/23: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100450002-4
 Approved For Release 2011/02/23: CIA-RDP88-01070R000100450002-4
THORNTON: What more might you say about his role in
Czechoslovakia and in Poland?
JAY: In Czechoslovakia, we know that at that stage he
was head of the KGB, that he was involved in some of the rather
crucial discussions which went on before the uprising was
suppressed. We know much more about his role in the Hungarian
revolution. Many of the Hungarian emigres who've survived that
period, and some of them are now in the West, speak very bitterly
of his role in what they thought was a trickery by the Soviet
authorities in leading them to suppose that the Soviet Union
would not impose armed force on the Hungarians. And indeed one
of them said to me yesterday, a general who now lives in this
country, that Yuri Andropov would have the blood of the Hungarian
people who died in the Budapest rising on his hands forever.
And, of course, this is very much in contrast with the
sophisticated liberal idea which has come out in the last few
months.
THORNTON: What's been the thrust of the KGB over the
past 15 years? Has it been more spycraft outside the Soviet
Union or repression inside? And what does any of that tell us
about Andropov?
JAY: Well, there are two areas, I think, which you have
to look at. One is the development of the whole idea of dealing
with the internal dissident problem, the people like
Solzhenitsyn, Bukovsky, and so on, in a slightly different way;
the attempt, as it were, to muzzle them by getting them out of
the Soviet Union, not by sending them to gulags, not by sending
them to mental hospitals. That is often associated with
Andropov. It's thought to be typical, as it were, of his
slightly more subtle approach to a security problem than some of
the previous KGB heads, who would have just shot these people.
On the international scene, his reign in the KGB was
coincidental with the whole development of the KGB role in
international terrorism. But again, it's not entirely clear when
one talks to experts on the Soviet structure of government
whether that's something which he would have had personal
responsibility for or whether it would have been something which
was more likely to have been a general decision of the Politburo,
of the ruling party people, which he then very effectively
carried out.
THORNTON: I would like to have your evaluation of his
speech yesterday. Some are calling it almost militant. Was that
your feeling?
JAY: I think Andropov is probably very aware that, in a
Approved For Release 2011/02/23: CIA-RDP88-01070R000100450002-4
 . Approved For Release 2011/02/23: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100450002-4
sense, although he has inherited the General Secretaryship of the
party, that doesn't give him automatically the strength and
authority which Brezhnev had just by having held this office for
18 years. He's still very much, himself, on trial. He still
needs to be militant, to put the tough line, to rally the forces
within the Soviet Union, and to make it quite clear that he
intends to be a strong leader. Although, as I said, at the
moment he can't yet claim to have that full authority that
Brezhnev had.
THORNTON: Margaret Jay of the BBC is at work on a study
of the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov.
Approved For Release 2011/02/23: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000100450002-4