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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.