Intrigue, Power and the Family Dog

In 1979, the KGB received a report from an agent working in a foreign intelligence organization that the wife of a Soviet diplomat was having a bizarre sexual relationship that might expose her and her husband to blackmail. The situation called for delicate handling: There was no reason for the innocent, high-ranking husband to find out about his wife and the family dog.


The sensitive report went all the way to the top. At a meeting between KGB Chairman Yury Andropov, his chief deputy Vladimir Kryuchkov and Chief of Foreign Counterintelligence Oleg Kalugin, Andropov took decisive action, ordering that the dog be killed in the defense of socialism.


For Kalugin, whose newly published autobiography "Spymaster" presents yet another inside story of the KGB, it was a long road from the time he entered a special KGB school in 1952 until he was able to participate in momentous decisions like this. He made his first spy mission to the United States -- as a journalism student -- in 1957, beginning an auspicious career that peaked in 1974 when he became the youngest KGB general in history.


But 1979 marked the beginning of the end of Kalugin's KGB career. As a result of conflicts between the rising young star and inflexible government bureaucrats (to hear Kalugin tell it), he found himself in a series of dead-end jobs until he was gracefully retired in 1990 at the age of 55.


At this point begins Kalugin's second career as Russian democrat. He was a member of the Congress of People's Deputies from September 1990 to December 1991 and defended the White House during the August 1991 coup.


One might expect that "Spymaster," if not a trove of startling revelations, would at least lay bare one man's tortured psychological transformation from spy to champion of democracy. It does not. Kalugin is -- by nature, it seems -- not inclined to introspection, and, like most autobiographies, this one is decidedly self-serving. Kalugin argues that he became a spy out of a sincere belief in the humanistic values of communism, and that he turned against the corrupted Soviet system for the same reason. However, the book presents the reader with enough information to draw more interesting, and more damning, conclusions about its protagonist.


Kalugin understood early on the value of being part of the system. As a child, he survived the blockade of Leningrad because his father was in the secret police. Kalugin and his mother were evacuated and spent several almost idyllic years in Omsk. His father remained in the besieged city, and survived the famine "only because he had been guarding the Party elite." Only in that way, Kalugin says, was his father "able to obtain enough to eat." On the other hand, several members of Kalugin's mother's family starved to death, and several others died defending the city. This contrast must have left its traces on Kalugin.


Although Kalugin is careful not to draw attention to it, the book catalogs the luxurious, privileged life that he led throughout his career: trips abroad, nice apartments, special stores, all the usual perks. Kalugin argues endlessly that such events as the overthrow of Khrushchev and the invasion of Czechoslovakia inspired his rebellion against communism, but the fact remains that he did nothing until he was cut off from his privileges in 1990. Kalugin is on thin ice when he condemns people who betrayed their country for money.


He also tries to draw a convenient but dubious distinction between what the KGB did abroad and what it did at home: While he and his colleagues were engaged in "a war of wits and skill and nerve" with the "cunning" CIA, domestic agents were merely "harassing our own citizens." But the line between the methods and goals of the two branches is repeatedly blurred: In the name of their glorious ideological struggle, Kalugin and his comrades find themselves doing everything from pimping to trafficking in stolen goods to desecrating Jewish cemeteries. Meanwhile the repressive work of the domestic KGB -- recording phone calls, opening mail, arbitrarily denying exit visas -- made Kalugin's privileges all the more valuable.


All that Kalugin can really tell us about the much vaunted KGB is that, despite an enormous commitment of money and personnel, it was staggeringly ineffective. Almost every important spy the KGB "recruited" -- including John Walker, the most important spy with whom Kalugin worked -- actually walked in off the street and volunteered. In one case a traitor who had been turned away by a KGB officer who suspected him of being a CIA plant threw a sack of secret documents over the wall of the Soviet embassy in Washington. The KGB officer on duty thought it might be a bomb and alertly called the police, who recovered the documents and arrested the informant.


Sometimes, however, things worked out. Take, for example, the case of the family dog. After consultation with "technical specialists," a lethal dose of poison was administered by a brave field agent. The experts, though, misjudged the dosage, and the dog survived the assassination attempt. Luckily, though, it was paralyzed from the waist down.


"Spymaster: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West," by Oleg Kalugin, Smith Gryphon, 375 pages, ?15.99.