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