Eyes of the Kremlin

By John Kohan

Four hours after the funeral of Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev last November, an incident that would have seemed improbable in the most contrived spy thriller unfolded in the Green Room of the Kremlin. As leader of the American delegation attending the Brezhnev burial, Vice President George Bush had been invited for a private chat with the new Communist Party chief, Yuri Andropov. The atmosphere was stiffly formal. Bush, who had been director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1976 to 1977, tried to break the ice with a bit of humor. Said the Vice President: "I feel I already know you, since we served in similar positions." Andropov sized up his American guest through thick bifocals and smiled enigmatically. For the first time in history, a former director of the CIA had come to visit the onetime head of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security), known worldwide by three letters: KGB.

As Andropov well knew, there is nothing at all similar about the position Bush held for a year and the powers that the Soviet leader wielded for 15 years as chief of the world's largest spy and state-security machine. From an office in the KGB's ocher-colored neo-Renaissance headquarters at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square,* barely a mile from the Kremlin, the head of the KGB oversees an intricate network of espionage and information-gathering operations that further the political objectives of the Communist Party. Unlike the CIA, the KGB works both abroad and at home, doing for the U.S.S.R. what the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Secret Service do for the U.S.--and a good deal more. The KGB chief commands an army of some 700,000 agents and about as many informers (vs. a U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence network of only 130,000), most of whom keep watch on their fellow citizens within the U.S.S.R. Even before Andropov's rise to power, the KGB's influence inside the Soviet Union was immense. Today more than four decades after the height of Stalin's reign of terror, many Soviets are still reluctant to call the organization by name, preferring such euphemisms as "the Committee," "the Office," or just an abbreviation, G.B.

Outside the Soviet Union, the KGB seems to embody Western fear and loathing of the Soviet system. Almost from its inception as an instrument of "revolutionary justice" following the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet secret police, known successively as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB and, since 1954, the KGB, has been synonymous with terror and coercion. It brings to mind the worst excesses of the Stalinist period: the public show trials and confessions exacted through torture, the random arrests and midnight executions in the infamous Lubyanka prison. KGB "sleepers" penetrating to the heart of Western intelligence services are now a staple of espionage fiction, film--and reality. Reports that Bulgarian agents in Rome may have aided Turkish Terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca in his attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in May 1981 have only added to Western suspicions of the KGB. In the view of many Westerners, the KGB would surely have been behind any Bulgarian plot to murder the spiritual leader of the world's 800 million Roman Catholics.

Given the KGB's awesome power and a well-earned reputation for ruthlessness and brutality, it had long been assumed that the men who rule the Soviet Union would never allow a secret-police chief to hold the nation's highest post. Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, 68, surmounted that obstacle last November, when he was chosen by the Communist Party's Central Committee to succeed Brezhnev. Andropov was relieved of his job as KGB chief six months earlier and moved to the party Secretariat, but the bureaucratic fig leaf deceived no one.

During his first three months in office, the neatly tailored and coolly authoritative Andropov has worked hard to shake the worldwide stereotype of the KGB heavy in the ill-fitting suit. In a rumor campaign that began before Brezhnev's death, Andropov was portrayed in the West as a sensitive liberal with a fondness for Scotch whisky and the Glenn Miller sound. Now, after most of the disinformation and half-truths have been sifted out, Andropov remains an unknown quantity. What is clear is that his rise to power has coincided with the gradual evolution of the Soviet Union as a modern police state in which the physical terror of the Stalin era has been largely replaced with subtler forms of control. The KGB has developed into an increasingly sophisticated instrument for advancing national interests around the world. As head of the KGB, Andropov had much to do with those changes. Now that he holds the top party job, he has given every indication that he wants to keep things that way.

Issuing a series of nuclear arms proposals designed to appeal to a foreign audience, Andropov has effectively revived the Soviet propaganda offensive against the deployment of new NATO missiles in Europe. So skillful has Andropov's performance been that General Edward Rowny, the U.S. negotiator at the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in Geneva, has jested that the West is being subjected to "trial by Yuri."

While seeming to be a man of peace abroad, Andropov has virtually declared war at home on sloth, corruption and any signs of nonconformity. In an effort to instill greater discipline in the malingering Soviet work force, police have been ordered to make sweeps of public places, rounding up drunkards, vagrants and workers who ought to be on the job. Last week Andropov went to Moscow's Sergo Ordzhonikidze machine-tool factory, where he held a shop-floor version of a town meeting, and bluntly told the employees that "without discipline we cannot advance quickly."

Intellectuals are also beginning to feel new pressures. In a wave of mass meetings, artists and writers have been warned of ideological "deviations" and reminded that their art must "help the party." Some have been singled out for more specialized treatment. Iconoclastic Historian Roy Medvedev has been officially told to "cease hostile activities" against the Soviet system. Nonconformist Writer Georgi Vladimov was threatened with criminal prosecution by KGB agents (see box).

Most of Andropov's major appointments to date seem designed to consolidate KGB power further. He elevated onetime Azerbaijan KGB Chief Geidar Aliyev, 59, to the key post of Deputy Premier. He sent Vitali Fedorchuk, 64, who replaced Andropov as KGB chief last year, over to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which controls the conventional police, or militsia. That move appeared to compromise a formal separation between the police and the security service that has been in effect since 1954. The new chief of the KGB is Viktor Chebrikov, 60, who served for 13 years as Andropov's deputy.

Some Western analysts speculate that Andropov's election as party chief reflects the gradual gravitation of political power in Communist countries toward the military and security sectors. Andropov's first round of appointments certainly suggests that he wants to use KGB men and methods to run the Soviet Union. But Vladimir Kuzichkin, a former KGB agent in Iran who defected to the British last June, insists that Andropov has been and remains a loyal party man. As Kuzichkin told TIME: "In the West people talk about the KGB as if it were an independent body. It is an instrument in the hands of the Soviet Communist Party. Whatever the KGB does inside the country or overseas, it does on the order of the Central Committee." In its emblematic role as the party's sword and shield, the KGB is perhaps the ultimate guarantor of Communist rule. It is the contemporary expression of the traditional Russian obsession with seeking out real and potential enemies of the state.

Ironically, Andropov may owe his rise to the bungling of one of the nation's most notorious secret police chiefs, Lavrenti Beria. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the tiny Georgian with the trademark pincenez tried to bully his way to power by incorporating the Ministry of the Interior into his vast security empire. That incautious move roused a vengeance-minded Politburo to action. Beria was arrested and executed. First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, in a famous secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, vowed that the state security forces would be subservient to the principles of "revolutionary socialist legality." The KGB would be run by political appointees answerable to the party leadership, men like Andropov.

A former Ambassador to Hungary, Andropov was chosen by Brezhnev in 1967 to continue the gradual "politicization" of the KGB. He took over a security service still demoralized after several reorganizations. Andropov set about winning friends among the power groups hostile to the secret police. The military, for example, has been a traditional KGB rival. Security police ruthlessly purged the military high command on Stalin's orders in 1937, and uniformed KGB agents still riddle the armed services at all levels, a power unto themselves. It was a measure of Andropov's political skill that he managed to form an alliance with Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, a crucial maneuver in his rise to the top. Says French Sovietologist Helene Carrere d'Encausse: "Andropov came to the KGB with a double mission: first, to rebuild an efficient police apparatus, and second, to transform it into a modern, effective instrument of the party. He succeeded on both counts." What the security operation lost in brute force it more than made up in political power under Andropov. In 1973, he was granted full membership on the Politburo, the Central Committee's ruling inner circle.

The KGB's new-found status has been enhanced by a public relations campaign designed to help traumatized Soviets forget the horrors of the Stalinist period, during which an estimated 20 million perished. The Soviet people have been served up idealized KGB agents in books, movies and television series. Unlike their counterparts in Western spy fiction, these heroes do not roll in the hay with curvaceous blonds or indulge in other unseemly 007-style vices, and they rarely reach for their pistols to liquidate enemies. Instead, they use their superior intellect to outwit the forces of evil, usually the CIA. The Soviet James Bond is Maxim Isayev, code-named Stirlitz, an undercover agent who manages to penetrate Nazi headquarters in a popular TV serial called Seventeen Moments in Spring.

To help build the new KGB, Andropov encouraged recruiters to go after the best and the brightest in the Soviet academic world. Says Leonard Shapiro, a Soviet specialist at the London School of Economics: "In the 1930s the KGB was full of thugs. Now it has become an elite that skims the cream from the universities." Recruiters are eager to enlist youths who speak foreign languages for possible assignment abroad. Students from Moscow's prestigious Institute of International Relations are in particular demand. For many youths, the appeal of a KGB job is a mixture of patriotic impulse and shrewd calculation. Says a recent Soviet emigre: "A post in the KGB conjures up a marvelous vision of all the perquisites that come with it: higher pay, larger apartments, better vacations, foreign travel--in short, all the things the average Soviet spends every moment of his waking life trying to get."

KGB recruiters zero in on the children of army officers, the police or the KGB'S border guards and agents. KGB scouts will invite candidates for an interview at a special training school. They will stress the organization's ideals and explain how it is the Soviet's patriotic duty to defend the motherland against imperialist spies and propaganda. For a young person from a collective farm, the KGB is an escape from the drudgery of rural life and a source of pride to parents, who can boast of a son or daughter in the KGB.

The KGB's most important mission is a domestic one: to ensure that party writ is faithfully followed from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka. From its Moscow headquarters, the KGB keeps watch over the activities of foreign tourists, journalists, businessmen and diplomats within the Soviet Union. The organization's major instrument of domestic control is its Political Security Service, known simply as Sluzhba (the Service), which, among other things, runs the national network of informers. The Sluzhba operates independently of the militsia in much the same way that the FBI works alongside the local police in the U.S.

The average Soviet feels the presence of the KGB most directly through the personnel department at his workplace. Ostensibly concerned with screening job applicants and maintaining security, KGB workers doubling as personnel administrators check for any signs of anti-Communist sentiment on the job. They often go so far as to oversee social gatherings, ensuring, say, that a rock band performing at a factory dance does not slip in politically questionable lyrics. If a Soviet steps out of line, "personnel" officials may summon him for a chat and, perhaps, make note of his behavior in his records. Says a British expert on the KGB: "People know that if they say something wrong they may not be imprisoned, as in Stalin's time, but their careers will go nowhere."

Still, with a landmass of 8.6 million sq. mi. and a population of 271 million, the Soviet Union would present logistical problems for even the most efficient police organization. The KGB manages to sustain the illusion of being all-powerful largely because Soviet citizens police one another. Schoolchildren are taught to revere Pavlik Morozov, a 13-year-old who was murdered by enraged villagers during the forced collectivization of farms in the early 1930s after he informed local Communist authorities that his father was sheltering more prosperous peasants. Few Soviets today would be likely to follow young Pavlik's example, but there are more than enough concerned citizens ready to play the role of stukachi, or stool pigeons. An elderly pensioner with time on her hands could consider it a patriotic duty to report any foreign-looking types who visit her apartment building at odd hours. In a society where many people routinely break laws against black-market activities just to get by, everyone is vulnerable to denunciation by a neighbor or friend who has his own sins to hide.

During the Andropov era, the overwhelming majority of Soviets have lost their fear of the midnight knock on the door and the random arrest, but the KGB still moves with brutal swiftness to suppress dangerous displays of "nonconformity." One innovation was the creation of a KGB directorate to control political, nationalist and religious dissent. The directorate has achieved results without great social disruption, something that Andropov's conservative comrades on the Politburo clearly value. The democratic movement within the Soviet Union that first surfaced in the 1960s and gained impetus from the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Human Rights has been all but crushed. Punishment for dissent has been selectively tailored for the dissidents: some are expelled, as outspoken Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn was in 1974; others, like Nobel Peace Prizewinner Andrei Sakharov, are sent into internal exile; still others--like Sergei Batovrin, spokesman for an independent peace group-are shut away in psychiatric hospitals. Finally, there is the Gulag, which, according to human rights activists, holds some 1,000 known political prisoners today, though the count might be three times as large.

The broad range of options available to the KGB is evident in its control of religious groups. Arrests of Russian Orthodox priests are rare because the party holds the mostly docile church hierarchy firmly in its grip. Protestant believers, mainly Baptists, Pentecostalists and Adventists, who refuse to register with the state, are routinely arrested and sent to labor camps. In the Roman Catholic republic of Lithuania, where clergy arrests might rouse nationalist feelings, three priests have been killed since October 1980 under suspicious circumstances; one was apparently pushed into the path of a speeding truck. Thousands of Soviet Jews who have been refused exit visas to Israel are also a target of KGB persecution.

Just how all-pervasive the KGB presence can be was illustrated last November, when a dozen Pentecostalists set out from Chernogorsk, Siberia, to visit relatives living in the basement of the U.S. embassy in Moscow. On their arrival at Yaroslavl station, they were greeted by a KGB agent who claimed to work for the visa registration office. Later, while the Siberians exchanged hugs and kisses with family members through the heavy metal grate covering an embassy basement window, a young agent in a black leather jacket perched on a nearby railing, taking pictures of them. Said a U.S. diplomat: "They have a hunting license to go anywhere in the system."

Western intelligence authorities fear that the KGB believes the same rules that lead to success at home will also work abroad. During the Andropov era, the KGB's foreign directorate moved out of the Dzerzhinsky Square headquarters to a large, modern, half-moon-shaped office building on the Moscow Ring Road. It expanded overseas operations, though it still shares assignments with the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye), the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet military. Many experts consider the KGB to be the world's most effective information-gathering organization. Says a senior intelligence staff member in Congress: "It used to be that you could tell the KGB guys a mile off. They were caricatures of themselves. Now they are highly sophisticated, urbane, exceptionally smart, and there are more of them."

Counterintelligence analysts estimate there are at least 350 KGB and GRU agents in the U.S. In Soviet embassies and consulates around the globe, at least a third of the resident diplomatic staff are estimated to work for the KGB. These "legals," who operate under diplomatic cover, receive support from other agents scattered through the Soviet press corps or the staff of Soviet agencies with overseas offices, such as Aeroflot and Intourist. The largest concentration of agents in the U.S. is in New York City, where special United Nations conferences can swell the size of the Soviet delegation to more than 1,000.

The KGB runs a parallel espionage operation using "illegals." Such agents assume a false identity, complete with a false personal history, or "legend," so they can penetrate deeply into a foreign setting. They often remain inactive for years before receiving an assignment from Moscow. Illegal Agent Rudolph Herrmann slipped into the U.S. by way of Canada in 1969 and, while posing as a freelance photographer, arranged information drops for other spies. FBI agents caught up with Herrmann because of a blunder by his KGB contact and turned him into a double agent. Herrmann "officially defected" in 1980, after receiving orders from Moscow to groom his son for the spy trade.

According to the FBI, the Soviet Union gleans about three-quarters of its intelligence from documents, publications and other sources freely available to the public. Soviet diplomats are a familiar sight on Capitol Hill in Washington, where they sit as observers at open sessions of sensitive congressional committees. Staff members in the office of former Congressman David Emery were taken aback during last year's debate over the MX ballistic missile when one brazen Soviet agent walked in looking for documents on the weapon.

Hardly any of the data obtained by such open means are of themselves damaging to national security. Still, intelligence officials fear that by arranging bits and pieces of data into a mosaic, the Soviets come up with some highly sensitive conclusions. Critics of the Freedom of Information Act claim that its provisions are so broad that even Andropov could request the same kinds of declassified information as any American. Says Edward J. O'Malley, assistant FBI director in charge of the bureau's intelligence division: "This is a problem inherent in an open society and it is not our place to draw the line."

Under Andropov's direction, the KGB has made a concerted effort to catch up with Western intelligence services in the technology of espionage. The Soviets are still lagging behind the U.S. in developing spy satellites. Only two weeks ago, a runaway Cosmos 1402 Soviet spy-in-the-sky plummeted to earth, the second such event in five years. But Moscow has made significant advances in electronic eavesdropping. Operatives from the KGB routinely monitor Western communications from embassy outposts bristling with antennas or from offshore spy trawlers. Ironically, the Soviets have benefited from the telecommunications revolution in the West. The use of satellites and microwaves to transmit telephone conversations has made it easier for KGB eavesdroppers to intercept highly confidential Government and business information.

If the KGB lags behind in technical spycraft, it is second to none in human intelligence "assets." KGB Defector Aleksei Myagkov says that between 1969 and 1974, 1,500 West Germans were recruited by the Soviets as spies. No one knows how many Americans have been enlisted, but FBI officials are sure of one thing: KGB activity in the U.S. is on the rise. Says the FBI's O'Malley: "It is evident in the ever increasing resources deployed against us, in the unrelenting effort by the KGB to recruit agents from Government, business and science, and the growing voraciousness of the Soviet appetite for science and technology."

In the 1930s and '40s, when sympathy for the Soviet experiment was high, the Soviet secret service could count on attracting ideologically committed foreign recruits. One such believer was British Intelligence Official H.A.R. ("Kim") Philby, who passed on secrets to the Soviets while serving as Britain's senior intelligence officer and, for a time, as liaison with the CIA. He defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. Now 71, Philby may have retired. U.S. intelligence experts have noticed a decline in the quality of KGB forgeries in English, a former specialty of Philby's.

The enticements for such traitorous acts today are various. In a permissive age, sexual entrapment is not as effective as it used to be, but it can still play a role in KGB blackmail schemes. In the late 1970s, a randy West German with political ambitions who had made several sexual conquests at the Leipzig Trade Fair soon learned that he was the unwitting star of a movie directed by the KGB's sister operation in East Germany, the MfS. If he did not show equal enthusiasm about climbing into bed with the secret police, agents threatened, they would turn over to the West German press photos of him wearing only his socks. West German counterintelligence foiled the plot by extracting a promise from the newspapers not to publish the photos. The KGB tried to snare U.S. Assistant Military Attache James Holbrook in a similar "honey trap" of seductive female agents during a visit to the Ukrainian city of Rovno in 1981. He reported the misadventure to U.S. officials and was sent home.

The KGB seems to have more success abroad when it simply pays for espionage, often at a surprisingly low rate. U.S. counterintelligence experts are concerned because a growing number of Americans with little or no political convictions have taken the initiative to provide the Soviets with information purely for monetary gain. Says the FBI's O'Malley: "The KGB manual says that Americans can be bought, and unfortunately it is often true, especially in difficult economic times." A roundup of recent rogues:

> In 1974 a young college dropout named Christopher Boyce, then 21, got a job as a communications clerk with TRW, a California defense contractor that was working on surveillance satellites for the CIA. He was disillusioned with the Viet Nam War and Watergate. At a party in 1975, he and a childhood friend, Andrew Daulton Lee, then 22, devised a scheme to sell information to the Soviets. Lee made the first contact at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, and over the next year and a half collected more than $60,000 for his troubles. Boyce made less: approximately $15,000. They were caught when Lee tried to contact his Soviet caseworker by throwing a message through the gate of the embassy and attracted the attention of Mexico City police. Boyce gave the Soviets valuable information, particularly about the "Pyramider," an espionage satellite in development.

> To Soviet agents in Ottawa, one Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, who remains anonymous, seemed an ideal "mole" for penetrating the Canadian security service. They wooed him assiduously. Details for secret meetings were passed inside a hollow stick or in a specially designed pack of Marlboro cigarettes. A piece of colored tape strategically placed on a pillar in a shopping center would also signal a rendezvous. Over a nine-month period the Mountie received $30,500; then Canadian police blew the whistle. The case proved to be a classic counterespionage sting. After the Soviets tried to recruit him, the Mountie had informed his superiors, who encouraged him to play along. The scandal resulted in the expulsion of 13 Soviet diplomats.

> Former CIA Undercover Agent David Barnett was having trouble making money from his antiques export firm when KGB agents approached him in Indonesia in the early 1970s. They were allegedly willing to pay $100,000 to hear his story of how the CIA had picked up Soviet military hardware from Indonesian naval officers in the 1960s, plus any other trivia about U.S. intelligence operations. In 1977 they prodded him to apply for positions on the Senate and House intelligence committees and the White House Intelligence Oversight Board. He was not accepted. FBI agents arrested him in 1980.

> Geoffrey Arthur Prime was serving with the British Royal Air Force in West Berlin when he offered his services to the KGB in 1968. Over much of the next 13 years, he worked as a Russian translator at Britain's top-secret electronic intelligence center in Cheltenham, and he managed to pass the Soviets sensitive information on British and American counterespionage efforts. After Prime was picked up last year for a sex offense involving a 14-year-old girl, his wife reported to police that she had uncovered spy equipment he had used.

> In the Southern California condominium complex where they lived, William Holden Bell and Marian Zacharski seemed to be merely good neighbors. They were more than that. Zacharski was a Polish intelligence agent and gave the financially strapped Bell some $110,000 over three years in return for secret information about Hughes Aircraft radar and weapons systems. By the time the FBI got wind of the deal in 1980, Zacharski had already taught Bell to make his own film drops in Austria and Switzerland.

> Two weeks ago South African police picked up Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, 47, and accused him of spying for the Soviet Union. The Berlin-born naval officer was apparently recruited by the KGB while training in Britain. Assigned to a naval base located on vital trade routes around the Cape of Good Hope, Gerhardt had access to secrets of international strategic importance.

One major development in KGB activity today is a growing interest in so-called LineX espionage, the theft of high-level technology (see box). Says former CIA Director Richard Helms: "Under Andropov, the Soviet Union has refined and expanded its intelligence targets. The new focus is on technology." Last October, officials of COCOM, the NATO committee overseeing East-West technology transfers, estimated that more than 20,000 Soviet and East bloc agents are now at work pilfering the latest Western gadgetry, and have whittled down the West's overall technological lead from ten years to about two. Prime American targets are the East Coast's high-tech corridor stretching from Boston to Baltimore, Southern California's aerospace industries, and the Silicon Valley, near San Francisco. The Soviet consulate in San Francisco has as many as 30 KGB and GRU agents, most of them scientific and technical experts.

The Kremlin can sometimes buy technology through intermediaries, "false flag operations." U.S. export restrictions prohibit the sale of sensitive equipment to the Warsaw Pact nations, but the Soviets have found willing channels abroad. West European businessmen will buy the desired hardware and export it to dummy European companies, which then reexport it to the Soviet Union. Austria and Switzerland, with relatively lax controls on imports, have become favored trading posts. Says an executive from one Silicon Valley company: "If every piece of equipment shipped to Vienna stayed there, the city would sink."

Much modern intelligence work is concerned not with military plans or industrial blueprints but with political information that can help the Kremlin zero in on targets of opportunity abroad. The Soviets may not be the initiators of global unrest, but they do their best to exploit it. KGB agents posted in the Third World alert Moscow to signs of political turmoil that could be fanned into "wars of national liberation." It is difficult to determine how critical a role KGB intelligence plays when the Politburo decides which rival political faction to back in a regional conflict. But it may have been because of such careful spadework that the Kremlin was able early on to examine Angola's struggle for independence and predict the winner, a nationalist group called the MPLA.

Once the Kremlin has determined what group can best serve its interests, KGB agents might be called on to provide paramilitary training or channel arms to the fledgling guerrillas. More often than not, however, such aid is provided by intermediaries. U.S. concern that the Soviet Union is intent on fomenting revolution in Central America focused on increasing Soviet military shipments to Cuba. These shipments jumped from 21,000 tons in 1980 to 40,000 tons in the first six months of 1981. The dramatic rise suggested that Moscow was arming not only Cuba's military forces but also Marxist insurgents in the region.

Soviet weapons were crucial in converting the Palestine Liberation Organization into a force capable of harassing and challenging Israel. Since the Soviet Union officially recognized the P.L.O. in 1974, the number of Palestinian commandos trained in the Soviet Union has swelled to more than 1,000, perhaps to 3,000. The P.L.O., in turn, has trained terrorists from many countries in a network of camps in Syria, Lebanon, South Yemen, even outposts as far away as the Indian Ocean island of Socotra.

There is circumstantial evidence linking the Soviet Union to West European terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany. When members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army went on a hunger strike in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison in the spring of 1981, for example, British intelligence agents noticed that senior KGB officials held a number of meetings with Provo leaders in Dublin. Says a top Western intelligence expert: "The Soviets back groups and people who are certifiably terrorist, but they do it with their fingers crossed and with their hands over their ears, if not their eyes. Backing a terrorist is a little like shooting craps, and the Soviets don't like to gamble."

During Andropov's tenure at Dzerzhinsky Square, the KGB stepped up efforts to influence world events in the Soviet Union's favor through propaganda and disinformation, so-called active measures. Some of the KGB's more polished agents abroad have apparently been instructed in recent years to cultivate officials of their host governments and drop tantalizingly frank tidbits of information during cocktail-party chatter. Says former West German Counterespionage Officer Hans Josef Horchem: "They come right up to a man, knowing that he knows they are KGB, and with a wink of the eye, they calmly ask him about exactly what it is they want to know. It is disarming because the other fellow is thinking, 'If he is being so open about it, maybe what I know is not so secret after all.' "

The question of Soviet influence becomes difficult to call when counterespionage officials try to uncover KGB links to the antinuclear movement in the U.S. and Western Europe. By CIA reckoning, the Soviets spend roughly $3 billion to $4 billion each year on overt and covert propaganda activities. According to a State Department official, as much as $600 million may have been spent so far on the peace offensive. Using national Communist parties or recognized Communist-front organizations like the World Peace Council, the Kremlin has been able to channel funds to a host of new antiwar organizations that would, in many cases, reject the financial help if they knew the source. Western intelligence experts believe that the mass movement in opposition to new NATO missiles in Europe probably was not Soviet-inspired, but they fear that the Kremlin's active measures have given the movement greater momentum.

In testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last year, the FBI's O'Malley claimed that KGB officers have recently instructed their contacts "to devote serious attention to the antiwar movement in the United States." He pointed out that a Communist-front group, the U.S. Peace Council, was among the organizers of last June's huge peace protest in New York City, and reportedly tried to direct criticism away from the Soviet Union. One Soviet diplomat posted in Washington, who is involved in active-measures work, frequently speaks at disarmament meetings across the country. But so far, according to O'Malley, the KGB has not manipulated the American movement "significantly."

Moscow has also tried to exploit the groundswell of popular feeling against nuclear weapons in Western Europe for its own ends. After mass demonstrations were held in West Germany in 1981, an official investigation turned up circumstantial evidence but no absolute proof of KGB involvement. It is widely rumored, however, that money for peace groups has come from East Germany and that leaflets and handbills may even have been printed in the Soviet Union. West Germany's more than 48,000-member Communist Party has had an influence on the peace movement disproportionate to its size. During a meeting held in Bad Godesberg last April to plan a protest rally scheduled to coincide with President Reagan's visit to Bonn two months later, leaders of the Protestant and environmental groups that had been at the forefront of the peace movement were repeatedly shouted down by an audience packed with Communists and fellow-travelers.

Counterespionage agents have turned up more compelling evidence of the KGB role in the Soviet peace offensive. For several years, Danish intelligence monitored numerous secret meetings between Arne Petersen, a Danish peace activist and writer, and three KGB agents. According to the Danish Ministry of Justice, the KGB promised to help finance advertisements officially sponsored by Petersen and signed by prominent Danish artists who wanted Scandinavia to be declared a nuclear-free zone. In November 1981, Norway expelled a suspected KGB agent who had offered bribes to Norwegians to get them to write letters to newspapers denouncing the deployment of new NATO missiles.

Sometimes the Kremlin tries to influence public opinion by outright deception. In an attempt to damage U.S.-Egyptian relations and scuttle Carter Administration Middle East peace efforts in the late 1970s, the KGB circulated a number of ingenious forgeries, some on U.S. State Department stationery, suggesting that U.S. officials had serious doubts about Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. One phony dispatch from the U.S. embassy in Tehran spelled out Iranian-Saudi plans to overthrow Sadat with American complicity. Soviet agents also distributed inflammatory "letters" from U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Hermann Eilts and a fictitious press interview in which then Vice President Walter Mondale expressed concern about Sadat's leadership.

The KGB can count on considerable help from sister security organizations in the East bloc. After World War II, the KGB organized intelligence networks in all the satellites. KGB liaison officers are still posted in the security services of each Warsaw Pact nation. Some intelligence experts believe that the KGB may have taken direct control of the Cuban security apparatus.

The satellite services all have a role to play. Explains a U.S. intelligence official: "The chief of the KGB residency in Washington holds regular meetings with the heads of the satellite intelligence services based in Washington, and they often divide up intelligence tasks." Czechoslovakia, formerly a favored channel for disinformation, seems to have taken on the job of watching East bloc emigres. East Germany is said to excel in electronic surveillance and detection equipment. Before martial law was imposed, Poland offered the best approach to influencing opinion in the West. In the U.S. alone, Poland reportedly can call on agents among some 200 trade representatives. Rumania has the crudest and largest secret police; some experts estimate that as many as one-third of all adults have served in the security service or cooperated with it. Bulgaria's secret police is especially valued for its loyalty. Explains an East European expert in London: "In Soviet eyes, the Bulgarian security service does not carry the same risk of defections as the Polish or Czechoslovak secret services--this is important in operations with a high risk of exposure."

Would the KGB have called on the Bulgarian security service to stage just such an operation in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981? The Kremlin certainly had a motive for wanting Pope John Paul II out of the way. Since his election in 1978, the Pontiff has shown particular concern for the plight of Communist bloc Catholics, and also set about improving ties with Eastern Orthodox churches in the region. Moscow has long been suspicious of any such religious activity, fearing that it might stir up nationalist sentiments, especially in the Baltic republics and the Western Ukraine. But what must have irked the Kremlin leadership even more was the Pontiffs strong support for Solidarity, the independent Polish trade union.

The assassination attempt came at a critical moment in Poland's 16 troubled months of reform. Polish Primate Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, long a symbol of opposition to the Communist regime, lay dying. Solidarity leaders had begun to feel the pull of more militant supporters, especially after a March 1981 clash with police in Bydgoszcz. Even rank-and-file Communists had started to call for democratic changes in the party organization. By striking down Solidarity's pastor and main international patron, the Kremlin could, in one blow, have demoralized Polish society and shifted the shaky balance into the government's favor. Explains a Vatican official: "It was the same kind of drastic action that the Soviets took when they invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. They did that while the whole world was watching. What would it matter if they were exposed for killing the Pope?"

In the Andropov era, the KGB has apparently been careful not to soil its own hands with murders of revenge, political assassination and other "wet" (bloody) affairs. A plot against the Pope would have demanded extreme caution, since it conceivably could have endangered Andropov's political prospects and damaged the Kremlin's European peace offensive. Says Helene Carrere d'Encausse: "If the West becomes convinced of Andropov's implication in this affair, it will not only diminish his international authority but shatter the modern, nonterrorist image that he has sought to give the KGB."

The Kremlin may have had the motive, but many Western intelligence experts question whether the KGB would have engineered so amateurish a murder attempt. Says a British government analyst: "The repercussions of a Soviet assassination of the Pope would have been of such horrendous proportions that it would seem only a fool or a madman could have authorized it--and Andropov is neither." Arguments that the plot against John Paul was too clumsy to be the work of Soviet security may overestimate the KGB's sophistication. Says the FBI'S O'Malley: "We have an enormous respect for them as adversaries, but they are not ten feet tall." In any event, the Italian investigation into the shooting continues, and the findings get increasingly curious.

KGB agents around the globe are ultimately cogs in a bureaucracy centered in Moscow that in many respects is just like any other in the Soviet Union, down to its own five-year plan. Because the KGB is organized in a rigid, vertical chain of command, cronyism is widespread. Many of its officers are not above currying favor with their superiors and sometimes compound their mistakes by trying to cover them up. According to Defector Vladimir Kuzichkin, this most secretive of organizations has had its share of minor security lapses. An angry old woman searching for a toy store located across the street was once discovered roaming through the ground floor of the KGB building. In an incident that must have left Andropov red-faced, a distinguished group of guests who had come to confer with the KGB chief discovered on leaving his office that all their elegant fur hats had been stolen from the anteroom.

It would be equally wrong, however, to underestimate the spy machine that the new man in the Kremlin built during his years at Dzerzhinsky Square. Andropov has received more raw information about things at home and abroad than any of his predecessors. He has had access to the KGB's dossiers on his Politburo colleagues. If he has resorted to repression as an instrument of social reform at home, he has shown subtlety in exploiting divisions in the Western alliance to further Soviet interests abroad. Predicts London-based East European Expert Leopold Labedz: "Andropov will prove to be a dangerous combination of strategic ruthlessness and tactical flexibility."

Such a puzzling mix of methods is certain to pose problems for the West. Still, however sophisticated he may be in his dealings with the outside world, Andropov cannot escape the restraints imposed on him by the security system he helped maintain at home. The Soviet Union may present a formidable facade to outsiders, but it remains a nation beset by fear of the enemy, both known and unknown. Andropov has surely believed for years that it is difficult to rule the U.S.S.R. with fear, but impossible to rule without it.

--By John Kohan. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow and Christopher Redman/Washington, with other bureaus

* Felix Dzerzhinsky, an aristocratic Pole turned revolutionary, was the first head of the Soviet secret police, which was founded shortly after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof, Christopher Redman, other bureaus This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.