Secret Emperors and Shadowy Assassins

The Soviet KGB is one of the most ruthless organizations on earth. Its functions are comparable to most of those belonging to the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service and parts of the departments of Justice and Defense. To control a population it can no longer inspire, the Kremlin relies upon security police and informers. To obtain military secrets and advanced technology it cannot develop efficiently at home, it employs espionage abroad. To subvert governments it cannot persuade through normal interaction, the U.S.S.R. has fielded a secret army--of mercenaries as well as Soviets--to advance its international goals.

The global scale of KGB operations is larger than the intelligence activities of all the West combined. Besides more than 100,000 professionals, the KGB has a specially trained elite army of roughly 500,000 equipped with the latest weapons, tanks and artillery. They guard frontiers, the Kremlin and other major government installations. They include highly developed sabotage units and special-purpose forces. The latter were used extensively to crush resistance to Soviet domination over Eastern Europe.

Secret emperors, the men of the KGB exercise preventive supervision of the population and its loyalty. The KGB could not halt the alienation that grew as Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's expansive promises of well-being went unfulfilled. But the "GehBeh," as the organization is nicknamed after its initials, can report what is happening to the leadership. The more disquieting evidence it produces, the more the KGB justifies its insistence on larger budgets and greater manpower. Since there really has been trouble--a food riot in Novocherkassk in 1962, for instance--the leadership has acquiesced to the KGB's demands.

Even the top men are constrained by the KGB. The Vertushka, the Kremlin telephone system, is installed, maintained and monitored by the secret police. Their agents serve as bodyguards, chauffeurs, cooks, valets and maids to Politburo members, guaranteeing not only security but surveillance.

Most sinister of the secret-police operatives are the shadowy assassins and terrorists whose specialty is mokrie dela (wet affairs), from the so-called Department V, the KGB's Executive Action Department. I had naively assumed that political murders, kidnapings, sabotage targeted against Western civilian sectors had been pretty much abandoned by the U.S.S.R. by the mid-1950s, after the Stalin-Beria era. I was wrong. I met some of those operatives when I first lived in New York as a junior diplomat.

One agent, expelled from the U.S. in 1969 after two tours at the mission, liked to brag suggestively about little matters he had "cleared up." One Sunday at lunch on the New Jersey Palisades in late 1965, he could not stop talking about New York's great blackout. "All those shining towers," he said, gesturing at the Manhattan skyline, "they look so strong, so tall, but they're just a house of cards. A few explosions in the right places and do svidaniya (goodbye). We're only beginning to realize how vulnerable this country really is." No one commented. Even KGB personnel feared him.

He and other KGB agents were often seen with "medical advisers" at the mission. Their jobs were to acquire as much information as possible about American medicine. Some were epidemiologists. The agent who was later expelled had spoken with relish about the possibility of demolishing New York's electric-power systems. Perhaps he was working out plans of an even more sinister nature with the poison and plague specialists.

A policy of violence, intimidation and death has been a historic Kremlin method of quieting opposition, from the assassination of Leon Trotsky to attempts on the lives of foreign figures like Dag Hammarskjold and Anwar Sadat. Soviet ties to guerrilla groups are so well known that the Kalashnikov submachine gun has become the symbol for international terrorism. The U.S.S.R. continues training terrorists within and beyond its borders to subvert stable nations and particularly to feed upon unrest in the Third World.

In the Third World, and at the U.N., the KGB cooperates with intelligence services of the Soviet-bloc countries. Closest to the Soviets are the Bulgarians, Cubans and East Germans. Bulgarian intelligence was the most obedient Soviet servant in terrorist operations and had widely penetrated Southern Europe and the Middle East. The Bulgarians worked on the Arabs and Turks. I saw an example of this when KGB recruitment of a Turkish diplomat in New York was accomplished with Bulgarian help.

I also heard from KGB officers in New York that they were outraged when Ludmila, the Oxford-educated daughter of Bulgarian Party Chief and President Todor Zhivkov, tried to reawaken Bulgarian cultural identity in the late 1970s. They considered her activity an "undue liberty." Ludmila became a political figure and a member of the Bulgarian Politburo. She died suddenly at the age of 38. I always wondered whether this was another "wet affair" carried out by the KGB's Bulgarian agents.

It is probably no exaggeration to count over half of the more than 700 Soviets in New York City as either full-time spies or co-opts under orders or influence of the KGB and GRU (the Defense Ministry's military intelligence arm). The KGB has cemented its place in the U.S.S.R. to a point where its power is unshakable. Although I escaped from it once, I never underestimate its reach or its savagery.