The new KGB director, Vadim Bakatin, has begun a massive purge of the Soviet secret police. His first victim was his son.
"I don't want him working under his father," Bakatin said gruffly, without mentioning what his son did for the KGB. "This way it will be easier for him."At the KGB, Bakatin has set himself a moral and administrative task of nearly incomprehensible scope. As he told reporters Friday, he is faced with a "vicious state within a state," a system of deception and force that fed its president lies and then organized his betrayal. And despite a round of firings and decrees, itis a system still staffed with those who did what they could to help last week's coup leaders prevail.
"This is not a suspicion - it's a fact," Bakatin said. "The leaders of the KGB and the prime minister and the defense minister pulled off a coup d'etat. How did it happen? It happened because the system of state security was a monopoly and it was used as a screen to enact the will of the Communist Party and its Politburo. The KGB was uncontrolled by anyone or anything. They had a free hand in the coup."
To guard against a repetition of the coup or any acts of terrorism, Bakatin has ordered his agents to be ready for attacks on elected officials.
The former KGB chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, was clearly in the inner core of the coup. While other ministers around him suffered from doubt and confusion, sources said, Kryuchkov was on the phone at the Kremlin issuing commands to the guards watching Mikhail Gorbachev in the Crimea and the KGB military units outside Moscow.
A Gorbachev loyalist who made concessions to the Baltic states while he was running the country's police network, Bakatin lost his job as interior minister last winter when Kryuchkov and hard-liners in the Parliament delivered an ultimatum to Gorbachev.
Last spring, Gorbachev brought Bakatin back into his circle of advisers. Bakatin routinely criticized Gorbachev - "We have no economic policy!" - but the Soviet leader valued his competence and his supreme self-confidence.
With Kryuchkov in jail and singularly unrepentent, Bakatin has moved to turn the KGB into an intelligence service of the Western type. He said he must begin with a game of "who is who," of finding out which agents he can trust.
A thorough purge, he said, "has to happen quickly to get rid of the reactionaries still (in the KGB) and to keep in the honest people and the real professionals."
He said the KGB will "in the very near future" allow the wife and children of its top defector, Oleg Gordievsky, to leave Moscow and join him in London. He has already lifted their round-the-clock surveillance.
He also said he will end all spying on politicians and legislators, and will soon end the phone taps on journalists and foreign business people. He said he will even create a civil advisory panel for the KGB similar to the CIA's adjunct intelligence board.
Bakatin dismisses any "crazy accusations" that Gorbachev helped plan the coup: "I don't think the people who began this mad adventure were so stupid that they were just playing a joke with tanks and guns for three days and then were going to turn to the man they called their `dear friend.' This is a crime punishable by the firing squad."