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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.