Big Brother Is Everywhere

The KGB is watching, watching, watching every minute

Countless espionage thrillers and spy movies have celebrated its exploits to Soviet citizens. Officers of the organization are regularly awarded the country's highest decorations, and their chief, Yuri Andropov, 66, is a member of the ruling Politburo. Andropov himself has said that a typical member of his agency is "a man of pure honesty and enormous personal courage, implacable in the struggle against enemies, stern in the name of duty, humane and prepared to sacrifice himself for the people's cause." The object of this official adulation is the Committee for State Security--acronym: KGB.

Most Soviet citizens do not share Andropov's high regard for the KGB. They view it with deep distaste and fear, in part because memories are still vivid of the murderous role played by the secret police in Stalin's dreadful purges. Although his successors halted mass terror and greatly reduced the KGB's autonomy, the agency continues to keep stern watch over every aspect of Soviet citizens' lives.

The KGB is the latest acronym for an organization that was founded in 1917 as the Cheka and was successively known as GPU, OGPU, NKVD and MGB. A fief within the Soviet state, the KGB is an intelligence agency, counterintelligence organization and internal security police with its own uniformed military branch. Administratively it is divided into various "directorates" whose number and function are frequently scrambled, partly to confuse rival foreign intelligence services.

The KGB's First Chief Directorate is in charge of the world's largest foreign espionage operation. Says one West German analyst: "It's safe to assume that there's not a place in the world where the KGB does not have its man."

The KGB's top external priority is gathering Western military technology secrets in order to avoid costly parallel research and development at home. A secondary but nonetheless vital concern is the collecting of political intelligence and the manipulation and recruitment of foreigners who might influence their governments' policies. Though the CIA, according to U.S. intelligence specialists, is far superior to the KGB in "comint" and "elint" (communications and electronic intelligence), the Soviets excel in "humint" (intelligence gathering through human contact). This was spectacularly demonstrated in Bonn last year, when West German counterintelligence finally caught up with a KGB agent functioning as a madam. For three years the operative had run a brothel catering to politicians and diplomats from whom she obtained political and military secrets.

For every KGB spy abroad there are five working within the Soviet Union. The Second and Fifth Chief Directorates employ an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 agents who are responsible for domestic security, including operatives assigned to the surveillance of dissidents, foreign students, journalists and diplomats in the U.S.S.R. American security officers who searched the residence of one U.S. diplomat in Moscow in 1978 found 42 microphones.

Western intelligence experts estimate the KGB's present strength at 500,000. Of these, 90,000 are believed to be directly involved in intelligence and counterintelligence work. An estimated 300,000 are uniformed troops responsible for the safety of the country's leaders and the protection of its borders. The other KGB employees perform administrative duties and help run prisons, concentration camps and those psychiatric institutions in which dissidents are often held.

KGB headquarters in Moscow is a grim, gray, seven-story stone building at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square; in tsarist times it housed the All-Russian Insurance Co. Behind the headquarters is the most celebrated KGB structure, Lubyanka Prison, through which tens of thousands of Soviet citizens have passed on their way to concentration camps or execution. These probably included three of Stalin's own secret police chiefs--Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria--who were shot following their fall from power. The KGB has administrative offices in every major center, and KGB officers occupy key posts in the Soviet armed forces and the regular police, as well as in factories, government offices, universities and most other major Soviet institutions.

The day-to-day work of keeping watch over the Soviet people is done by part-time informers, or stukachi (squealers), as they are contemptuously called. The system of informants is so pervasive that most Soviets take it for granted that a stukach is always near by. At work, a factory laborer may be fired from his job for telling political jokes that an informer has repeated to the head of the personnel department, who is invariably working for the KGB. At home, an apartment dweller knows that his superintendent regularly reports on any unfamiliar visitors he may receive --especially overnight. Pressures on ordinary citizens to turn informer are great. Black marketeers and others arrested for petty crimes are offered freedom from prosecution in exchange for cooperation. Plainclothes KGB operatives take pains to blend in a crowd, but can often be spotted. One giveaway: good shoes on somebody who is otherwise shabbily dressed.

Backing up the stukachi network is a gigantic mail and telephone surveillance operation. A Soviet dissident now in exile once ran a test of the KGB's postal monitoring system by sending 100 letters to a West European town from various mailboxes in the U.S.S.R. Only six got through. Selective surveillance of mail and telephone calls has been made much easier in recent years by computers that enable the KGB to monitor specific targets.

Andropov is the first KGB head since Beria to sit on the Politburo. He is a party man, not an agency professional. His most notable previous post: Soviet Ambassador in Budapest, where he helped put down the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Among Andropov's most important functions is to keep the KGB under firm party control so that the secret police can never again wield the power it possessed under Stalin, when it arrested, tortured and killed thousands of loyal party officials.

One highly publicized KGB responsibility is to rid the country of dissenters. Of the 2 million people currently imprisoned in the Soviet penal system, about 10,000 are so-called prisoners of conscience, who have been jailed for their religious, intellectual or political beliefs. In the past year the KGB has employed increasingly sophisticated methods to discredit dissidents; Jewish activists have been charged with speculation and other economic crimes in order to whip up local anti-Semitic feelings.

In the Ukraine, 36 human rights activists have been convicted since 1976 on charges ranging from hooliganism to sexual offenses. In Kiev, both Jewish and Ukrainian activists have been severely beaten by KGB agents. In one celebrated case last year, witnesses say they saw two men force a popular Ukrainian nationalist composer, Volodymyr Ivasiuk, 31, into a KGB car. Three weeks later his body was found hanging from a tree; his eyes had been gouged out. Such acts of brutality--still rare but apparently on the increase--are strictly illegal. The KGB, however, remains capable of acting as a law unto itself.

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