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The biggest threat of all to the organization was contained in the impending union treaty: it would loosen Moscow Center's control of KGB units in the republics and affect sensitive issues like security budgets. By last winter some of the KGB's top officers were in the forefront of a conservative backlash, spearheading a campaign against "economic sabotage" that singled out the developing free-market sector as a special target. Speaking before a secret session of the parliament in June, Kryuchkov lambasted Gorbachev's entire program as a product of the CIA's designs for "pacification and even occupation" of the Soviet Union.
In the view of Western experts, the KGB is now likely to be drastically reorganized and stripped of much of its domestic responsibility. U.S. and British analysts suggest that the agency's overseas spy service, the First Main Directorate (there are nine Main Directorates), will remain. A new organization, along the lines of the U.S.'s FBI, may be formed from the Second Main Directorate (internal security). Such restructuring could mean, among other things, a dramatically smaller agency. American experts estimate the KGB's current size at 600,000 members, 265,000 of them border guards, 230,000 in military units, and 40,000 assigned to domestic surveillance. Foreign intelligence, the elite division, accounts for perhaps 20,000 operatives. The KGB of the future could be a rump organization, its feared sword blunted forever.