
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 17, 1990                   TAG: 9006170091
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Newsday and Associated Press
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Medium

KGB STILL POWERFUL, EX-OFFICER SAYS

A self-described retired KGB officer told a meeting of radical Communists Saturday that the state security committee was still hiring informers inside political opposition groups and seeking to discredit political activists.

The country "used to be a dictatorship. Now it's a party-police state system," said Oleg Kalugin, 55, who said he retired from the KGB several months ago.

"All those who think the security organs are not strong any more are deeply wrong," he said. "They have agents . . . and helpers anywhere in our society from academics, athletes, musicians, political leaders and music critics." Without giving details, he also charged that the KGB was working to infiltrate the new workers' movements springing up in the coal fields.

The blue-eyed, brown-haired, immaculately dressed Kalugin, who made a surprise appearance at a meeting of the Democratic Platform, said he had been a career KGB officer who served in the United States for 12 years until the early 1970s. He said he had been chief of external intelligence until he had a falling-out with the department in 1979 because he defended a man he thought had been unfairly sentenced to a labor camp.

He said he was switched to first deputy chief of the Leningrad KGB but was removed and sent to "KGB reserve" under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences when he protested the activities of the Leningrad Communist Party leadership and then wrote a letter to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 saying the KGB had to be reined in if his social reform programs were to succeed.

Kalugin said he thought the KGB should be drastically scaled back, retaining only its foreign intelligence-gathering operations. He said the internal directorate should be dissolved and moved into the Interior Ministry to be something like the American FBI, and that KGB security guards who protect Soviet officials should be put in the customs service.

"The KGB has too much political power," he told reporters, "and in this capacity will remain a threat to the democratic forces.

"I would abolish the KGB as such," he said.

Kalugin showed reporters his KGB identity card, but he declined to give specific names of informers, cite any instances of KGB infiltration of democratic groups or provide other details of internal operations. A spokesman for the KGB could not be reached for comment.

CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield in Washington confirmed a man named Oleg Danilovich Kalugin was at one time a KGB major general in charge of foreign counterintelligence.

"We find it encouraging that an increasing number of Soviet officials are speaking so candidly," Mansfield said. "We think there is some merit in this suggestion" of disbanding the KGB, he said.

by CNB