A MODERN EX-KGB GENERAL

John Simpson calls on an

enlightened old friend and colleague of Kim Philby

Moscow 'OLEG D. Kalugin', said the card; and underneath, 'Counsellor, Ministry of Fore- ign Affairs of the USSR'. It was as mislead- ing as the other cards he must have proffered in the past: 'Correspondent, Moscow Radio' or 'Press Attaché, Soviet Embassy'. Oleg D. Kalugin was a spy: once the KGB's man in overall charge of political intelligence in the United States, and a general before he was out of his forties. Now at 55 he has taken early retirement. The KGB didn't like his poli- tical opinions or the things he was starting to say about the organisation. It forced him out before his time.

At first I thought I had come to the wrong place: a weed-grown housing estate in the Moscow suburbs, with the usual wrecked cars and rows of discarded empties. A cat yowled and ran. But there were security devices on the door, the concierge was smartly dressed, and there was no smell of urine on the stairs. Kim Philby, it turned out, had once thought of moving here. General Kalugin was one of his closest friends, and wrote the foreword to the Russian edition of Philby's tantalis- ing, self-serving memoirs, under a different name. Later, he showed me a signed copy. 'All the best, old chap,' it said at the bottom.

Most people's idea of the KGB general would be a squat, porcine, Asiatic figure with hands like a boxer's. Kalugin's hands were long and well-tended; they could have been those of the principal 'cellist of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra. His col- lection of records seemed particularly strong on Verdi; Sartre, Bertrand Russell and Thomas Mann were all represented on his shelves. There were some pleasant late-19th-century Russian landscapes on the walls, and some not so pleasant heads: a species of deer, a turtle. The problem for Oleg Kalugin is that he has evolved and the KGB — like a stuffed turtle — hasn't. His shift away from the KGB began in earnest in 1979, when a dissident scientist who was a friend of his was framed by the KGB as an American 'You're quite right. They are trying to kill you.'

spy. Kalugin defended him, and paid the price; he was moved sideways to be the KGB chief in Leningrad. Three years ago, thoroughly disillusioned by the organisa- tion's failure to adapt to the changed times of perestroika and glasnost, he set out his complaints on paper to Mikhail Gor- bachev. Gorbachev, it seems, let him know he agreed with almost everything he said; and that didn't help his career either. Finally, when the break came, he joined the Democratic Platform, the group of opposition Communists who may soon break with the Party altogether. He calls them 'the Left', which seems a strange description. In an interview with Komso- molskaya Pravda and a speech at a Demo- cratic Platform press conference he pulled no punches. The KGB was the same organisation it always had been, bugging, following, spying on the people whose politics it didn't like. That, he says, in- cludes anyone who supports the concept of pluralism in Soviet politics. 'They haven't even changed their vocabulary,' he said to me, as we sat in the dining-room where he had often entertained Philby and George Blake to dinner. 'They still proclaim their loyalty to the vanguard role of the Com- munist Party, after the Party itself under Gorbachev had dropped it.

'They hate what's going on in the Soviet Union. Not all of them, of course, because there are many people inside it who think like me. But they are not the majority, and they are military men who have to obey orders.' He was, he conceded, slightly nervous about what his former colleagues might do to him. Even violence couldn't be ruled out, he said, though it would not be sanctioned by the organisation as a whole. But there were always individuals who might do something. Now he was consider- ing going into full-time politics, not least because that would offer a measure of protection to him.

The KGB has always had its internal dissidents, just as the CIA and MI6 have. Would his friend Philby have approved of what he had done? I asked Kalugin. 'He would have approved of most of my ideas, but I don't think he would have liked the idea of my speaking out publicly about the service.' Oleg Kalugin has defected not to the protection of another secret service organisation, but to the general public of the Soviet Union: a much braver and nobler thing to do than anything Kim Philby ever did.

The day of the ideological secret service is over. The KGB cannot trust its em- ployees to avoid thinking for themselves any longer. Russians have taken to the principles of free speech and free thought with the intensity they bring to every new experience, and it may well be impossible to maintain the old firm as run from the Lubyanka (which before the Revolution was, suitably enough, the headquarters of a big insurance company).

All over Central and Eastern Europe former officers in the secret police have been offering their services to anyone who will take them. But there are few buyers. In the centre of Bucharest last January I met a lieutenant-colonel in the Securitate and his wife, who was a captain. They made an odd couple: the wife with a blond beehive hairdo, the husband, no taller than five foot three, with his hair en brosse. 'Be quiet, Bobby,' they would shout in unison as their shaven poodle barked excitedly and tried to mount my leg. The colonel wanted to defect to Britain, and asked me to be a go-between. In exchange for an interview, I promised to do my best. Britain wasn't interested, and before long he bought a visa out of the country. But he was still obsessed with unburdening him- self to the British secret intelligence ser- vice; he seemed to feel it had a higher tone than the CIA or the French SDECE. Eventually, the extent of his demand was that MI6 should spare him half an hour if he paid his fare to Britain; but even that, he told me later, was denied to him. 'There are so many people trying to defect,' he said; 'Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Ruma- nians. Who wants us now? Maybe I will write a book.' I could have told him that publishers are as uninterested in former spies as Western secret services are.

But General Kalugin is, as the French say, serieux; he is not for sale. He was prepared to talk to me about the distant past — the KGB was, he maintained, appalled by the assassination of President Kennedy — which happened during his time in the United States — and played no part in it — but he would not talk about more recent operations. His concern now is with ensuring the continuation of demo- cracy in the Soviet Union, and its extension into new areas of public life. What he has done is a kind of experiment, to see if it is possible for someone so senior in the most secretive branch of the Soviet system to talk openly about its activities.

`Is your flat bugged?' I asked, looking round at the tasteful pictures.

`Probably not,' said the general. 'For that you need compliant neighbours, and I doubt if my neighbours would be com- pliant.'

`But your phone?' `Ah, certainly. I have bugged too many of my former colleagues in the KGB to imagine that they are not bugging me.' He conceded that those former col- leagues might try a little character assas- sination on him: accusing him, I thought, of discussing the affairs of the KGB with a Western journalist like myself. He was psychologically prepared for that, h@ said. His stand was not made on the basis of personal vindictiveness but of political principle. That was his strength. I shook the firm hand and looked into his blue eyes for the last time. The expen- sive double doors closed behind me. Was General Kalugin just a little too good to be true? Was the courageous and outspoken democrat just another alter ego, like the counsellor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the correspondent of Moscow Radio? Perhaps the KGB is trying to give some hidden message to the outside world through him, like one of the long line of its defectors, crammed with disinformation. And yet it is hard to see what advantage it would be to the KGB to tell the world that it is entirely untrustworthy, anti-demo- cratic and unreconstructed. 'The lead- ership of the KGB hates everything that is happening in the Soviet Union,' he told me. That seems unequivocal enough.

I went back to my office in Moscow and pondered over the interview. After a while the telex machine sprang into life. It was the KGB with a statement about General Kalugin. 'The State Security Committee firmly rejects such assertions by Kalugin and expresses indignation at his insults against the professional honour and human dignity of KGB personnel,' it said. 'His remarks make one question his aims.' I felt thoroughly reassured; that was, indeed, the true tone of KGB outrage. The general was genuine.

John Simpson is the foreign affairs editor of the BBC.