KGB Today

...Today it has brought forth a larger and even more enthralling book, aimed at "up-dating" the earlier catalogue of "dirty tricks"-by telling us, for example, how the KGB, having vainly tried in late autumn 1979 to poison Afghanistan president Hafizullah Amin, had his Kabul palace stormed by a special assassination squad and team of Soviet commandos...

...Levchenko's career also illustrates how the original idealism of a privileged member of the Soviet elite is bound to be undermined by daily contact with a surprisingly attractive foreign world once he escapes from the cocoonlike insulation of the Soviet system...

...plans for the Boeing 747, which has led to the spawning-by-spying of the Ilyushin 86...

...Pronnikov, in fact, even managed to engineer the recall to Moscow of his boss, Major General Dmitri Yerokhin...

...KGB TODAY: THE HIDDEN HAND John Barron / Reader's Digest Press / $19.95 Curtis Cate John Barron's first book on the KGB-or the "Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents" (as it was subtitled) -was published in 1974, and the pioneering spadework that went into that work continues to produce a rich harvest...

...Maybe it hasn't come to that in the FCD, but I can tell you it has in the MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] and Ministry of Trade...

...No less shocking has been the absent-minded casualness of the State Department, which agreed to the Soviet Embassy's request to build a brand-new building on Mount Alto, from which superlative eminence the KGB "will be able to intercept microwave communications among many of the government's vital installations...

...The brand-new car was full of mechanical and other defects, which Levchenko had to have repaired by hiring two moonlighting mechanics, who stole the necessary parts from a rocket-guidance-system factory where they were employed...

...People will even sell themselves...

...Similarly, the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco-a hornets' nest of spies swarming out in all directions to suck all the nectar they can from the dozens of nearby institutions and laboratories engaged in sophisticated scientific research and development -should be closed down once and for all...

...But the supreme scandal of all, to which John Barron devotes many pithy pages, is the brazenness with which a Soviet KGB colonel named Yuri Kapralov was able, with the willing connivance of a variety of left-wing, Communistfront, and other "do-gooder" organizations, to mount a huge "nuclear freeze" campaign from the campus of Georgetown University, a bare two miles from the White House...

...plans for the U.S...

...As Barron puts it, the value of the advanced-technology secrets smuggled out of the United States every year by the KGB's Scientific and Technical Directorate far exceeds the annual cost of maintaining and operating the entire KGB...

...Only a few years ago, it took the form of a relatively short but fascinating book devoted to the career of Viktor Belenko, a Soviet air force pilot who requested political asylum in Japan after landing an advanced MIG-25 fighter plane on a civilian airfield on the island of Hokkaido in September 1976...

...Commerce Department, which under Jimmy Carter was allowed to dwindle to a staff of ten inspectors and 25 other personnel...

...After a term of intensive training at the USSR's Foreign Intelligence School, located in a top-secret forest-surrounded compound near Moscow, Levchenko, who had managed to master Japanese as well as English, was sent in 1974 to Tokyo as correspondent for the Soviet monthly, Novoye Vremya (New Times), a magazine launched during the Second World War to provide a journalistic cover for Soviet spies...

...Although ostensibly an "independent" journalist who was allowed to move with his wife and child into an apartment away from the Soviet compound, Levchenko found himself directly subordinated to the local KGB Residency, which occupied the top two floors of the eleven-story embassy building...

...Andropov himself is very worried...

...Unfortunately, it would be rash to rejoice at this revelation of the CIA's alleged ability to penetrate the upper organs of the Soviet state...

...Wherever he turned in the capital of his own country, Levchenko encountered mendacity, cynicism, and corruption...

...More than half of this book, KGB Today, is devoted to the life stories of three important Soviet spies, each of whom has a curious story to tell-and did so to Barron...

...It also offers revealing glimpses of how the KGB's Second Chief Directorate (the rough equivalent of our FBI, but vastly magnified into a gigantic eavesdropping hydra) systematically spies on officers of the First Chief Directorate, with a cynicism as ferocious as that which it exhibits in tracking down and persecuting dissidents...

...They include the advanced designs for a "quiet" radar (destined for the B-l and even more revolutionary Stealth bomber...

...It's enough that Barron has to remind us: "On any given day, the Soviet bloc can send into the streets of Washington and New York more professional intelligence officers than the FBI can deploy against them...

...Equally timely is his plea that the CIA-the country's first line of defense-be radically revitalized, and that the woefully undermanned FBI receive a wholesale injection of new blood...

...The third, a Canadian economics professor named Hugh Hambleton, now languishes in a British prison for having all too casually transmitted scores of secret and top-secret NATO documents to a KGB officer in Paris over the six-year period from 1956 to 1961...

...As a KGB colonel was heard to lament: "Two or three years ago, had any of us heard of an FCD [First Chief Directorate] officer stealing watches at headquarters or hawking contraband like an itinerant Armenian rug peddler...

...Yes, John Barron's eye-opening book should be made must reading for every congressman, governor, civil servant, businessman, teacher, clergyman, engineer, scientist, newspaperman, and peanut farmer in our still too complacent, somnolent, and unsuspecting land...

...specifications of the F-15 fighter's "look-down, shoot-down" radar...

...Now, everything is for sale...

...The contrast was made all the more vivid during a period of home leave in Moscow, when he used 860,000 hard-currency yen that he had earned in Japan to buy a Volga car for something like $3,660 which, sold to an unprivileged Soviet citizen in ordinary rubles, would have cost about $14,000 and a wait of several years...

...He suggests that the number of Soviet "diplomats" in the United States, and particularly those who enjoy the free-travel privileges of United Nations employees, should be drastically reduced...

...Minuteman silos and for the Red-eye missile (of which the Soviet SAM-7 is basically a copy...

...The first, Major Stanislav Levchenko, defected from the KGB Residency in Tokyo in October 1979 and, after 24 harrowing hours (graphically described), was allowed to fly to political asylum in the United States...

...A Moscow traffic cop who stopped him for making a wrong turn was bought off with a Japanese cigarette lighter...

...The CIA is picking agents there like apples in an orchard...

...To scrape up the money needed to buy himself a car, a KGB senior lieutenant who had not yet served abroad had taken to stealing the watches of First Chief Directorate officers while they were taking sauna baths...

...the designs and drawings for the large C-5A cargo plane (transmitted to the USSR even before Lockheed had begun its manufacture...

...semi-conductors needed for the development of integrated circuits and microcomputers (essential for accurate rocket targeting...

...Such mass larceny and smuggling were made possible not only by American naivetl and the illusions of dtnte, but more directly by the shocking negligence of the Compliance Division of the U.S...

...From friends in the KGB central headquarters Levchenko heard of a KGB colonel who had been caught red-handed peddling Japanese cassettes on a Moscow sidewalk...

...As happens with so many Soviet citizens when they are exposed for some time to conditions in a foreign, capitalistic country, Levchenko was struck by the immense gap separating the distorted image of Japan as peddled by official Soviet media and the vibrant reality of a flourishing free-enterprise society with which he was daily confronted...

...Thanks to his engaging manners, fluency in Japanese, and ability to write articles that went beyond mere propaganda hogwash, Levchenko not only impressed his Japanese colleagues but eventually gained admission to their prestigious Press Club-the first Soviet journalist to be so honored...

...Just read the chapter entitled "The Main Enemy," wherein Barron lists some of the industrial and technological secrets that the 400 KGB and GRU (military, naval, and air intelligence) officers regularly stationed in the United States, aided by several hundred other spies from East European countries, have managed to steal in recent years...

...meticulously polished laser mirrors which Soviet technicians have so far been incapable of producing on their own...

...This Residency, like the Soviet embassy itself-about half of whose employees were stukachi (informers) forced to report on their colleagues-was a veritable snake-pit of intrigue, fomented by an Iago-type propagator of false rumors and suspicions, Colonel Vladimir Pronnikov...

...And to this list might be added the Ilyushin 76, which bears a curious resemblance to Lockheed's C-141 transport...

...Of the three life histories, that of Stanislav Aleksandrovich Levchenko is for my taste far and away the most interesting-for what it tells us about the atmosphere of back-stabbing intrigue and corruption which reigns not only in the "Central" headquarters of the KGB's First Chief Directorate (concerned with espionage and terrorist activities abroad), but also in the various Residencies located in Soviet embassies in foreign capitals...

...The second, Ludek Zemenek, alias Rudolf Hermann, rose to become a KGB colonel in the United States before being trapped by the FBI...

...He was accordingly sent a directory of foreign correspondents accredited in Tokyo, put out by the Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association, which, when he dropped it off at the KGB Residency, was immediately photocopied and sent on to Moscow as a "secret document"-a typical case of KGB skullduggery which won him a commendation from the Center...