The text of the decree, penned in the name of "improving the fight against crime," said the new department would have 1,000 employees in branches spread out over the country.
Among those employees would be investigators who had worked in the former Security Ministry, the KGB's immediate successor, and younger investigators at the beginning of their careers, said Alexander Zdanovich, a spokesman for the counterintelligence service.
The Security Ministry was abolished in December 1993 and was replaced by the Federal Counterintelligence Service, known by its initials, FSK.
In the time between the abolition of the Security Ministry and the signing of Wednesday's decree, the investigative department belonged to the Public Prosecutor's Office.
"The decree turns the FSK from the secret service into a law-and-order body," Zdanovich said.
The decree also envisions giving the FSK criminal cases currently investigated by the Public Prosecutor's Office. Zdanovich said such cases included the investigation of espionage incidents, treason, terrorism and smuggling.
The newly formed department already has its first task: investigating the cases of seven recently detained foreign spies, Interfax quoted Alexander Mikhailov, a chief spokesman for the service, as saying.
Mikhailov refused to name the spies' nationalities, citing an agreement reached between Russia and most Western countries not to transfer conflicts between secret services into the sphere of state actions.
The additional 1,000 investigators will bring the total number of employees at the service to 76,000. The former Security Ministry, whose structure closely reflected that of the KGB, had 135,000. Zdanovich said the FSK had 20 departments; only six deal with crime-fighting.
The service, headed by director Sergei Stepashin, is directly subordinate to Yeltsin. To make important decisions, Stepashin periodically convenes the service's collegium, a panel of department heads.
Aleksei Smirnov, executive director of the International Research Center on Human Rights, who spent five years in jail for spreading "anti-Soviet propaganda," sharply criticized the president's decree, saying it could cause abuses.
"According to my information, there are still people both in the investigative department and in the FSK who persecuted dissidents and used illegal methods, including tortures," Smirnov said.
Smirnov said that when he was accused of anti-Soviet activity, in 1982, Major Sergei Balashov was one of the key investigators who had protected the Soviet system "with conviction," and had labored to put him in jail.
"He still works in the service," he said. Zdanovich confirmed that Balashov -- who lead the investigative department when it was a part of the Security Ministry, is now a major general at the service, in an administrative capacity.
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