Film gives audience a glimpse of KGB

_ At the unspoken centre of every discus- sion about the Soviet Union over the past Many years there has always been a certain

organization, some would say a “ resence,” ya p

So shrouded in cold war mythology and coloured by them-and-us perceptions, that it has frequently been manipulated into the very symbol of the Soviet system: the Committee of State Security — Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopastnosti, or KGB as It Is universally known. It was never easy to talk about it in measured or factual tones, but all that seems to be changing.

_Last week Novosti press agency pre- viewed its latest telefilm production, The KGB Today, before a cynical foreign press corps, followed by the first-ever press con- ference with KGB officials — and drew all the predictable responses.

The film itself presents very interesting, if tame, material, taking the viewer beyond the front doors of KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square to meet and hear from different sorts of people who work there. The KGB is depicted — in more-or-less

FROM MOSCOW

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similar terms to those in which Western security establishments are portrayed in our media — as a big, multi-faceted and spe- cialized police force.

The film admits that the KGB has. a par- ticularly serious historical problem to deal with and overcome, particularly its prede- cessor organizations’ (NK VD and OGPU) involvement in the crimes of the Stalin era, but its emphasis is on the KGB’s patriotic and law-governed work of today.

We see dramatic, actual footage of the KGB nabbing two American diplomats in an act of espionage. We observe KGB spe- cialists extracting bugging devices from the walls of the Soviet embassy in London. There are interviews with investigators on the trail of organized crime, drug traffickers, smugglers. We see border guards at work — a task which in the USSR falls to the KGB. We briefly meet an instructor in the KGB school, various recruits and oper- atives. There is even an extraordinary seg- ment with the widow of former KGB officer Kim Philby.

All of this is perfectly legitimate stuff, intended to show that in a dangerous world, a country needs a tough, professional secur- ity force. To its credit, the film also points out that we all have a common stake in working to make the world less dangerous through international dialogue, agreements and co-operation. ;

However, some of the crucial questions concerning the citizen’s relationship with the security organs do remain frozen in the background. In a face-to-face meeting with three KGB colonels which followed the screening, Western correspondents dis- played an uncompromising, bulldog-like tenacity — of the sort which invariably deserts them when called-upon to deal with their own or allied states’ security establish- ments — in trying to highlight some of these questions: What about investigations of private groups and individuals? Tapping of telephones? Use of informers? The KGB

answers were curt and evasive, and if you

closed your eyes you could easily picture an :

FBI or CSIS official saying: “Of course

there are secret aspects to our work, these

are the demands of security... No one who is innocent need worry ... We don’t do that sort of thing... Don’t make allegations you can’t prove ....”

~

World

At top: A session of the Supreme Soviet which for the first time this year, approved the appointment of KGB director. At right, a KGB officer. shows devices found in the Soviet embassy in

Washington, D.C.

Do you suppose any Canadian government will ever submit a CSIS director to election by Parliament?

I have no idea how my various main- stream colleagues will write about their first- ever official encounter with the KGB, but I suspect it will be without much serious reflection and with more than a dollop of one-sided stereotypes.

Actually, with all we know about Soviet reality today it seems that the KGB must be pretty much as Novosti has described it, a large, multi-departmental, specialized police force and intelligence-gathering institution. By all accounts its secret police functions have been vastly curtailed in recent years: it has not acted lawlessly since the Stalin years, and the legal environment which gave it latitude to engage in selective repressions against dissidents during the Brezhnev period has been profoundly altered. Many of those who were its targets 10-years ago are members of the Congress of People’s Deputies today.

Indeed, the film’s director herself notes that in the dozens of on-the-street interviews she did with people to gauge their attitudes towards the KGB, she was amazed to find the dominant public impression one of “respect for the KGB for managing to keep itself clean and stand above the corruption of the Brezhnev years.” It will be interesting to see how Soviet audiences receive this Novosti film, due to be televised shortly.

However, it is only one straw in the wind, evidence of growing public awareness and discussion of security-in-the-context-of- democracy. A much bigger and more signif- icant precedent was set last July, when

_ Vladimir Kryuchkov appeared before a full

session of the Supreme Soviet to have his candidacy for the post of chairman of the KGB approved, and to answer deputies’ questions concerning the work of the KGB. The meeting was televised, country-wide,

and a transcript of the proceedings was pub- lished in the newspaper Sovietskaya Ros- siya. (Do you suppose any Canadian government will ever submit a CSIS direc- tor to election by Parliament, or expose him to free-for-all questioning — on television — in the House of Commons? I’m only asking.)

Kryuchkov won his job, with six votes cast against him and 26 abstentions. In the course of a rather able performance — some of the questions from deputies were considerably more hard-hitting than those of my colleagues at the press conference — he seems to have convinced most that the KGB today is actually anxious to deal con- structively with the horrific Stalinist past, to participate in coming to terms with it, and to transform itself in whatever ways Soviet society should democratically decide.

Said Kryuchkov: ‘“‘We believe that fun- damentally new principles of the ratio between the state and its security should be formulated and carried out. It is not the society and the state which should adapt themselves to the activities of state security bodies and services, but, on the contrary, the KGB bodies and their services that should undeviatingly proceed from the interests of the society and state.” He called upon the Supreme Soviet to enact a law on state security, and also one on the KGB itself, to govern all future activity.

The discussion — an inevitable one — which can now be seen creeping into the Soviet press, concerns the powers and the role of secret police in a socialist state. There is no mystery here: the distinction between

- “police” and “secret police” is, first, that ‘ secret police require no evidence of a crime ‘having been committed or in preparation in

order to launch an investigation; they can, .

and do, use purely political criteria. Second, secret police need never bring the results of their investigations into a court of law or any other public forum; their subjects will never have a chance to defend themselves, indeed, may never know they are being watched.

By these standards it is perfectly clear that the overwhelming bulk of what the KGB does is regular — if often specialized — police work. Some of it, however, is undoubtedly the other.

What has to sink in, and it is long past due, is that none of this puts the KGB ina class by itself. The modern KGB is very much the product. of the cold war era, whose distorting effects have been felt rather symmetrically in East and West.

Canada, for instance, has two, probably three secret police forces. We have CSIS which keeps files on at least 300,000 indi- vidual Canadians, taps phones, opens mails, pays informers and does all this, with rare exceptions, completely outside of pub- lic knowledge and control. Less well- known, we also have the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), which eaves- drops on domestic and international tele- communications, again with no public awareness or scrutiny. (These are the only people in the world who get to read my telexed dispatches before the Tribune editor does:) And now the news is that the RCMP is back in the secret police game with its newly-created National Security Investiga- tive Directorate.

So, some of these questions, as they begin to come into focus in the USSR have uni- versal implications. There is every reason to watch closely as Soviets seek to re-define the sovereignty of the citizen, and his/her rela- tionship to the state and its institutions. We might even learn something new.

Pacific Tribune, October 2, 1989 « 9