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.