A bitter pill

Fifteen minutes outside Sofia, on the lower slopes of Mount Vitosa, squats the Boyana government residence a hulking, marble-and-glass disfiguration of the archi-tectural meaning of a Roman villa, constructed at the behest of former Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov.

It was here that the heirs to the Eastern European and Soviet intelligence agencies recently gathered with their cold-war adversaries for an international congress of spies. The conference--entitled, didactically, "The Proper Role of an Intelligence Agency in a Democracy"--was co-hosted by the current, democratically elected president of Bulgaria, Zhelyu Zhelev, and the Washington-based Center for Democracy.

The opening session revealed an extraordinary array of powerful men, most of them visibly uncomfortable at their unaccustomed exposure. First among those from the East were the Russian Federation's perspicacious, somewhat porcine, spymaster, Lieutenant General Vadim A. Kirpichenko, forty-year veteran of the KGB, now serving as deputy head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, and Anatoly A. Oleinikov, First Deputy Minister of (internal) Security. They were followed by the Byelorussian and Kazakh former KGB officials who now head the security agencies of those republics, and the deputy head of the equivalent Ukrainian service. Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic had all sent chiefs or deputy chiefs of security. Finally, there were fresh-faced representatives from such newly independent countries as Croatia and Macedonia.

For the West, too, the showing was impressive. The United States was represented by the former Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby, and by the president of the Center for Democracy, Allen Weinstein. The UK was absent, but Germany was represented by Alfred Einweg, Data Protection Commissioner, the man charged with overseeing the files retrieved from the Stasi. France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Canada, Israel, and the Council of Europe were also represented.

Not surprisingly, the early speeches served as platforms for the Eastern services to proclaim their new-found devotion to rule of law and human rights, and to focus on the structural reorganization they had undertaken. Bulgaria had split its service into parts and put the foreign department under the direct control of the president. Transition in Rumania and Poland was taking place within a strict system of executive controls.

This narrow focus gave the impression that several of the Eastern European countries were mistaking restructuring for reform. Evidence that this was the case came when the straightforward Mr. Einweg hauled the reluctant participants into the issue of the appropriate use of the files of the former services.

Einweg was adamant--despite the furor within Germany and elsewhere at the revelations of the extent of the Stasi's crimes--that the files must be made available for the world to learn from. Bulgaria's security chief candidly said he wanted to burn all his country's files as Greece had done after the Colonels. The embarrassed Greek representative said that they had only burned their files after they had received permission from those about whom they had been compiled. The Polish representative said that if they started to bring individuals to justice, then those agents who had been rehired would be vulnerable to blackmail. Weinstein and Colby argued persuasively that the truth had to be told. The Russian representative stayed diligently silent.

The moral high ground, here, was clearly with the West: real reform comes not just from the introduction of strict legal control, but also from the public airing of the past, so that a new sense of what is acceptable is built into the new service. Yet, these ethical conclusions are entangled with practical concerns.

The dignified Catalonian, Santiago Bastos, estimated that it would take at least three years for a service that was starting from scratch to begin efficient intelligence collection. Countries that reform aggressively, making both former and current employees of the services publicly accountable for their past actions, are necessarily more vulnerable to those who would return to dictatorship. Thus, in embracing reform, countries expose themselves to the very anti-democratic forces they are seeking to bring to justice.

Enter Russia.

As the principal heir to the USSR, and thus to the KGB, Russia is far and away the region's dominant power in the areas of intelligence and security. The approach it takes, therefore, will inevitably be the primary influence on the services of its neighbors.

Throughout the conference both Mr. Oleinikov and General Kirpichenko had maintained a safe distance from the issue of reform versus maintenance of effective security. When pressed in an interview, however, they indicated that their services, having been "depoliticized," were carrying on with their work as usual.

Indeed, there seems to be no question of discarding the enormous asset Russia inherited in the KGB's global intelligence network. Rather it is maintaining or increasing its intelligence presence around the world.