Kgb

Spy watchers can read anything into a gesture. It is their job, after all. Still, Soviet KGB chief Vadim Bakatin's gesture was something far out of the ordinary. Mr. Bakatin, saying "I don't know how long I'm going to be here," turned over the plans and instruments used to turn a proposed United States embassy building in Moscow into a giant KGB microphone. His agency never admitted bugging the place, but U.S. sleuths had figured out that they'd been had long before the building was ever completed.

Many of us who labor in journalism inevitably have contact with U.S. Secret Service agentsand encounter men and women as devoted to their task, as serious of purpose, and as professional as any of the finest in law enforcement. So it is nothing short of shocking to learn not only of last week's scandal in Colombia but also of hints that the problem may run deeper than one night of wild partying with prostitutes in Cartagena. President Barack Obama has said that he will be "angry" if the allegations prove true, but it appears the White House is slightly behind the curve.

MOSCOW -- Vil S. Mirzayanov, the chemist who was charged with leaking state secrets, has filed a lawsuit seeking 40 million rubles in damages from the former KGB, a chemical weapons research institute and Russian prosecutors.Though he has been trying to file suit for several weeks now, Dr. Mirzayanov said, it was finally accepted this week by a Moscow district court.Dr. Mirzayanov was charged with revealing state secrets after he asserted in an interview with The Sun and in a Moscow newspaper article that Russia was continuing research on chemical weapons.

Vitaly V. Fedorchuk, 89 Former KGB leader Vitaly V. Fedorchuk, who rose through the Soviet intelligence and police services to become the leader of the KGB and then the country's hard-nosed chief law enforcement officer, died Feb. 29 in Moscow, the Federal Security Service, the main KGB successor agency, announced. From late 1982 to early 1986, Mr. Fedorchuk was interior minister, making him the Soviet Union's top police officer, in charge of uniformed officers from detectives to game wardens.

MOSCOW -- To the outside world he has been known as Alexei II, the patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, head of the Russian Orthodox Church and its tens of millions of believers.But to the KGB, he was "Drozdov," the code name the Soviet secret police gave to an agent who served them well for more than a quarter-century, according to church dissidents and some lawmakers."Drozdov" surfaces often in KGB reports about high-level agents inside the Russian Orthodox Church, they say.In October 1969, KGB archives show that "Drozdov" went to England for a meeting of the European Conference of Churches, bringing back information "about certain persons of interest to the KGB."

New Orleans. - It's no picnic being a spy these days. Look at what Robert Gates is going through: They are trying to make him tell the truth.That's organically impossible for a spy. Contra Naturam. They train spies to fool lie detectors. If Mr. Gates says he tells the truth it means that he's lying. Only if he's lying (which he won't tell us) might we assume that he's telling the truth. Cretans were liars. Therefore they were spies. Also, spies talk in codes. They are codes. What do Watergate, Irangate, Contragate all have in common?

MOSCOW -- The men in camouflage fatigues and ski masks, armed with powerful automatic rifles and grenade launchers, were clearly on serious business -- but the frantic management of Moscow's most powerful and politically well-connected bank spent all of yesterday trying to figure out who they were and what they wanted.They followed Vladimir Gusinsky, president of Most Bank, from his home to his office yesterday morning. They spent the daylight hours in parked cars, across the street from bank headquarters, at the front of the Russian White House.

MOSCOW -- By the convoluted standards of Soviet foreign trade, Boris I. Korobochkin's barter deal seemed simple enough.The Singapore company would get 50,000 tons of Soviet-manufactured mineral additives for livestock feed. In trade, it would supply the Soviet side with 1,200 personal computer systems, plus a number of photocopiers, telefax machines and other equipment in short supply.However, to Mr. Korobochkin, the would-be middleman, the deal brought not the intended profit but a score of KGB interrogations, nine volumes of evidence and a month in Moscow's infamous Lefortovo prison.

MOSCOW -- Former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov began planning the coup against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev as early as late December, but he overestimated the passivity of the Soviet people and assumed they would be easily intimidated by tanks, a senior KGB official said yesterday.Maj. Gen. Anatoly Oleinikov, a KGB officer for 24 years, said a KGB internal investigation showed that six more senior KGB officials had been involved in the coup and could be arrested soon. Fourteen people have already been charged with treason, among them Mr. Kryuchkov and four other officers of the KGB secret service.

MOSCOW -- The KGB, Russia's secret police and espionage agency, knows of no contacts between its former Soviet agents and Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton when he visited here as a student 23 years ago.The KGB said so yesterday in response to an inquiry from The Sun last week, when the implication was raised by Republicans that there was something subversive about Mr. Clinton's visit to Moscow at the height of the Vietnam War."In reply to your inquiry, the External Intelligence Service has no information on any contacts with the KGB of the U.S. presidential nominee Mr. Clinton relating to his trip to Moscow in 1969," the agency said yesterday.

MOSCOW -- Russia said yesterday that it would expel four British diplomats and suspend counterterrorism cooperation with London in the latest step in a confrontation linked to the radiation poisoning death of a former KGB agent turned Kremlin critic. Britain had announced Monday that it was expelling four Russian diplomats over Moscow's refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian businessman accused of using polonium-210 to poison Alexander Litvinenko last year in London. The British government also said that it would place restrictions on visas issued to Russian officials.

The Russian leadership probably hoped that the world would lose interest in the murder in London of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, as it had for such high-profile murders in Russia as that of crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya. But this week the British charged another former KGB agent, Andrei Lugovoi, with that murder and said they would seek his extradition. To show that they were serious, they summoned the Russian ambassador to the Foreign Office. Mr. Litvinenko received a lethal dose of radioactive polonium-210, a material that would suggest some level of state involvement, and in the three weeks it took him to die, he accused the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the KGB, of the attack.

LONDON -- Yuri Felshtinsky well remembers when he spent the better part of five hours pleading for the life of his friend, Alexander Litvinenko. It was May 22, 2000. Litvinenko, a colonel in the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, had just spent four months in prison, having gone public with allegations that senior secret police officers were involved in murder and kidnap operations for financial gain. Now he was free, but for how long? Felshtinsky called up Litvinenko's old boss, Maj. Gen. Yevgeny Khokholkov, and agreed to meet him for dinner at a small restaurant near Moscow's old Ukraina Hotel.

MOSCOW -- Russia's chief prosecutor said yesterday that a key potential suspect in the poisoning death of dissident former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko has been hospitalized, and that British investigators would be allowed to see him only if doctors grant approval. Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika said Russia's constitution forbids extradition of citizens, and that if any Russian suspects are identified in the case, they could only be tried in Russia. Despite earlier top-level pledges of Russian cooperation, he indicated that British investigators could face obstacles in pursuing leads in Russia.

LONDON -- British authorities said yesterday that they are widening their investigation into the poisoning of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko on the heels of a fresh series of leads into the Russian dissident's murky political and business connections that span from Moscow to the United States. British news media reported that police investigators were in the United States interviewing former KGB agent Yuri Shvets, who purportedly has information on a dossier Litvinenko had in his possession relating to the Kremlin's pursuit of figures linked to Yukos Oil Co. The company was forcibly broken up and effectively renationalized in 2004 after Russian authorities imprisoned its chief executive.

LONDON -- An Italian KGB expert who warned Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko that his life might be in danger the day he was poisoned has a "significant quantity" of radioactive polonium-210 in his body, authorities said yesterday. British health officials also said they had detected a small quantity in a close relative of Litvinenko's, though neither of the new victims has shown signs of illness. The revelations came as police zeroed in on traces of radiation found on British Airways jets that flew between Moscow and London, one of which may have carried suspects transporting the radioactive poison.

MOSCOW -- The KGB, traditionally distinguished by monolithic loyalty to the Soviet leadership, is showing increasing signs of splitting into pro-reform and anti-reform factions under pressure from media scrutiny and a multiparty system.A small but growing number of current and former officers of the powerful intelligence and security agency are going public with criticism of its operations, while the KGB brass continues to insist that no internal reform is needed."Unquestionably, there has appeared a division within the KGB," said Alexander A. Milchakov, a Moscow journalist who has regular contact with KGB employees in his research on mass graves of victims of Stalin-era executions.

MOSCOW -- The KGB kept close tabs on Lee Harvey Oswald while he was living in the Soviet Union, but his files show that the Soviet spy agency had no role in President John F. Kennedy's assassination, the head of state security in the republic of Belarus said yesterday.The files also suggest that Oswald was a notoriously poor marksman, said Eduard Shirkovsky, the security chief.Those files have remained classified, but Mr. Shirkovsky told a news conference in Minsk yesterday that the Parliament of Belarus could order them to be opened, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.

MOSCOW -- It's a crime straight out of the pages of a Cold War spy novel. A former KGB agent, who angered the Kremlin and was investigating a murder, lunches with an Italian who claims to have useful leads. When the ex-spy gets back to his London home he keels over, poisoned with rat killer. What happened to Alexander Litvinenko on Nov. 1, however, was real and gravely serious. Doctors say he ingested thallium, a highly toxic substance used mostly in rat poison, and is fighting for his life at University College Hospital in London.