FSB: The KGB with A Vengeance /
From the start, President Vladimir Putin spared no resource to strengthen Russia’s intelligence agencies. He inflated security budgets with cash from soaring oil prices, and he used state-owned media to make spying look good again. A belief spread that the KGB ogre had re-emerged as the FSB, the Federal Security Service. This was a convenient myth not only for human rights activists and journalists but also for FSB officials. Evoking a bygone era, they persuaded the Kremlin that their traditions and methods were crucial.
Like all myths, the truth here is much more complex, and it is deeply disturbing as a new Russia takes shape.
By the late 1980s, just before the Soviet collapse, the Committee for State Security – the KGB – was different from other intelligence services in the world. Mukhabarat intelligence services in the Middle East also combined secret police, spying, and counterintelligence under one roof. But their scope was confined largely to domestic matters.
The KGB consolidated its intelligence functions as the main Soviet weapon against political enemies at home and abroad. Only the Communist Party kept this powerful body in check; each division, department, and office had a party cell, a peephole by which the state could monitor agents.
After the Communists lost their power, nothing supplanted party supervision. Boris Yeltsin’s first challenge was to place the KGB behemoth under his thumb. His liberals decided to weaken its super-structure by splitting it into smaller independent agencies, American-style.
A separate Foreign Intelligence Service stripped the new FSB of the KGB’s external spy network. Ground forces were reassigned to border control. The intelligence agency no longer protected leaders; an independent force similar to the U.S. Secret Service did that.
A Federal Agency of Government Communication and Information (FAGCI), analogous to the U.S. National Security Agency, handled electronic surveillance. The FSB was even deprived of its secret bunkers, which went under the president’s direct authority. The neutered agency kept only a nominal presence in the army. All told, the FSB was pruned to resemble something similar to Britain’s MI5.
Yeltsin liked checks and balances, and he retained control by instigating intrigues within the splintered intelligence community. For instance, he played FAGCI and the FSB against each other, making both responsible for monitoring political developments and then using one agency’s reports as leverage against the other.
This volatile, imperfect system hobbled along until 1998 when the first directors of the FSB, FAGCI, and Foreign Intelligence Service were retired. Putin, with deep KGB roots, was named to head the FSB. Elected president two years later, he set about remaking the crippled agency.
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