The name has been changed five times in the past five years. But the agency headquartered in what was the Lubyanka prison is still known here and abroad as the KGB.
“Changing names is a hobby of ours,” shrugs Aleksandr Mikhailov, press agent for what is this month called the Federal Security Service.
Today, fans of political repression will be glad to learn, the KGB is getting a second wind.
Boris Yeltsin proposed and signed a new law that encourages warrantless agents to enter anyone’s dwelling on suspicion of any sort of criminality. He also issued a decree requiring the licensing of computer encryption devices, providing KGB access to all data transmission.
As a result, morale is said to be as high as that of the CIA is low. This despite the inability of the KGB to set up a puppet regime in Chechnya, or later to anticipate the Chechen resistance to invasion.
Though the KGB has a gentlemen’s agreement with other secret services not to identify the nationality of spies it captures, its counterspy business has been lively with Turkey, Ukraine, the Baltics and China.
Do not underestimate the skill of Russian security: the Ames debacle reminds us that even as the Soviet Union was losing the cold war, the KGB was winning its battle with the CIA. Yeltsin respects that KGB power; he has been careful to keep state security dispersed.
Closest to him is the Presidential Security Service, a Praetorian guard of 4,000 run by Aleksandr Korzhakov, said to have “black brains”-anti-intellectual, moody, brutal.
The next circle is the Main Administration for the Protection of the Russian Federation, a force of 40,000 to protect-actually to watch-other Russian leaders, run by Mikhail Barsukov.
Then comes the KGB, whose budget authorizes a force of 76,000, many now authorized to work in other nations. Internal anti-corruption activities are directed mainly at Yeltsin opponents.
Furthest from Yeltsin, but a counterweight to the KGB, is Yevgeny Primakov’s Foreign Intelligence Service, its numbers unknown to me. Primakov is still tight with Iraq’s Saddam.
The services overlap in functions, and their members have subtle interrelationships; Korzhakov loyalists permeate the other units, and vice versa.
Today’s visitors have no memory of being crowded by bugs, cut off from truthful communication, fearful of meeting Russians lest they be arrested. They take for granted the way they can speak freely, watch CNN or go to people’s homes.
The anomaly that is pre-democratic Russia is best shown in the local media’s gutsy reporting of the menacing growth of security forces. The KGB flack puts it in a nutshell: “They write what they like and we do what we like.”
