Kgb

Is the FBI becoming an American version of the KGB? Since February something very wrong has been happening in the Philadelphia court system. Judges have been secretly gathering evidence against their fellow judges at the direction of the FBI, and under pressure to do so. The district attorney has likewise been gathering evidence against judges. These activities have been accomplished by typical KGB methods, secretly bugging offices and personal conversations. This has resulted in creating a fear among everyone working in the court system.

The head of the KGB, in an unprecedented address to the Soviet people, warned on national television last night that the country faced the threat of collapse and that his secret police agency would wage an all-out struggle against growing separatist and criminal elements. Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, in a 10-minute address at the end of the Soviet Union's nightly news program, also said that foreign intelligence services were waging a "secret war" against the U.S.S.R. by fanning the flames of nationalist unrest.

The head of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti - the Committee for State Security, or KGB - yesterday made an unprecedented appearance before the Soviet legislature to face questioning about the operations of the feared, super-secret intelligence organization. The occasion was the confirmation hearing of Col.-Gen. Vladimir A. Kryuchkov as director of the KGB. Although the 65-year-old career intelligence official actually took over the agency in October, the newly elected Supreme Soviet has the right to review and approve the appointments of all government ministers and heads of state committees.

A new Lou Harris poll finds that a bare majority of the American public believes that Nick Daniloff of U.S. News & World Report is not a spy, while roughly a third of the people are firmly convinced that he is. President Reagan's personal assurances to the contrary, a sizable portion of his countrymen refuse to believe that Daniloff, who has spent the past two weeks in Moscow's Lefortovo prison, was framed by the KGB. Yet if you put the same...

The Soviet army yesterday announced the death of a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who defected to the Soviet Union, confirming that the man was a spy and hinting that he might have been a "mole" infiltrated into the United States as a youth. An obituary in the newspaper Red Star said that "Mikhail Yevgenevich Orlov (Glenn Michael Souther)" died June 22 at age 32, but gave no cause of death. The formulation apparently was intended to suggest that the Russian name was his real identity.

"Little Nikita" has a big case of ampersanditis. This is a cinematic disease whose main symptoms are too many unconnected strands of plot, no clear sense of direction to the story and screenwriting credits that go something like this: "Screenplay by John Hill and Bo Goldman. Story by Tom Musca & Terry Schwartz. " It would take a scholar to decipher precisely what that means. My best guess would be that the Musca & Schwartz together (the ampersand means they're a team) wrote a screenplay that was deemed unacceptable and sent to Hill for a major rewrite.

The head of the KGB yesterday launched a stinging attack on Western intelligence services, saying they were trying to subvert the Soviet Union's reform drive. In a lengthy, rare interview in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda, Viktor M. Chebrikov accused the West of trying to undermine Soviet society and perestroika, or reconstruction, by supporting and manipulating groups hostile to Kremlin policy. While saying he supported perestroika within the KGB, Chebrikov made it clear that glasnost, or openness, about the security police would remain limited by the battle with Western intellgence services.

The past weighs heavily on Rein Sillar, but it is not as great a burden as the present. Here in the Baltic republic of Estonia, Maj. Gen. Sillar is head of the KGB, the organization that he freely admits was responsible for the deportation, imprisonment or execution of more than 100,000 of his countrymen in the 1940s and '50s. "The shame is that we don't even know how many were repressed," he said. Sillar is the first Estonian-born KGB chief in nearly 50 years, at a time when the republic is struggling to break free of the Soviet Union.

In his ultimate baseball job as charter manager of the expansion team known as the New York Mets, the lovable Casey Stengel once looked at the odd lot of had-beens and never-would-be's stumbling around the new turf of Shea Stadium, and wondered: "Can't nobody here play this game?" There were many colorful observations credited to Stengel in his long career, as captured in his 1962 book, "Casey At the Bat," but no single quote has stuck to his name so tenaciously as that desperate utterance about the fledgling Mets.

A former political prisoner of the KGB was charged over the weekend with attacking a Russian woman he had befriended in Delaware County, police in Radnor Township said yesterday. Sergey V. Kirichenko, 33, was arraigned at the Upper Darby Regional Court late Saturday and held on assorted criminal charges on $75,000 bail at the Delaware County Prison. No hearing date has been scheduled. The complainant was listed in good condition at Bryn Mawr Hospital with multiple bruises and cuts.

Britain to probe ex-agent's death LONDON - A coroner has agreed to open a full inquest into the radiation poisoning of the former KGB officer Alexander V. Litvinenko, potentially bringing the case before a British legal forum for the first time, opening new seams of information about his death and possibly raising tensions with Moscow. The decision by the coroner, Andrew Reid, on Thursday came five years since Litvinenko died after ingesting a rare radioactive isotope, Polonium 210, believed by the police to have been slipped into a teapot at an upscale hotel on Nov. 1, 2006, just weeks after Litvinenko had acquired British citizenship by naturalization.

"DESPICABLE ME" turns out to be surprisingly funny, charming, and even timely - given that its title character is an incompetent Eastern Bloc villain. The kind of guy who'd be right at home in that recently busted-up ring of KGB (KGB-minus?) agents who went deep undercover to infiltrate Yonkers and other New York suburbs, so they could relay to Moscow information on . . . Chuck E. Cheese? Costco? The Boris Badenov stand-in in "Despicable Me" is Gru (voice of Steve Carell)

RICHARD and Cynthia Murphy are the picture of suburbia. The couple suspected of espionage on behalf of Mother Russia were captured on camera seated at a table full of American goodies: Bud Light, Coca-Cola, Heinz ketchup, hamburger buns, paper plates and towels on a checkered cloth. Richard Murphy has a cheeseburger in one hand and a Coors Light in the other. His wife is putting the finishing touches on the food in front of her. The picture could've been taken anywhere in the country, especially around Independence Day. So how did two Russians manage to perfect American life all the way down to the details of a typical barbecue?

Staring at a laptop on his mother's kitchen table in Pottstown, B.J. Ellis ponders the meaning of life. But not for too long. Someone, somewhere, has spent 99 cents to ask this red-haired stranger a question for the ages. The sooner Ellis answers, the sooner he can move on to easier queries such as: Answer: 181 over six seasons. A superfan, Ellis adds that the TV counterterror agent lays waste to an average of 1.3 victims per hour. Answer: No. Most cats are lactose intolerant.

Harrison Ford may be 65, but not to worry - it's clear in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" that his stuntman is only 25. In the first few minutes alone, Indy dodges a thousand bullets, swings from the rafters via his famous rawhide whip, and outruns the shock wave from an atom bomb. The year is 1957, the bomb is a military test in New Mexico, and none of this is by happenstance. Steven Spielberg has come to praise Indiana Jones and also to bury him, and so he positions Indy's swan song in the mid-1950s - the moment when the United States made the pivot from a nation that built its mythology around a heroic past to a nation whose atomic age imagination was fixed on the future.

They were the new kids on the underworld block. More important, federal and local authorities said, they were the wave of the future. Based in Northeast Philadelphia - some, in fact, had attended George Washington High School - they called themselves "KGB," a not-so-subtle reference to a time and a place that their parents, at least, remembered. "The KGB was a crime wave in Northeast Philadelphia," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Foulkes, one of two prosecutors who spearheaded the case against the organization two years ago. Tracked by the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime Squad, KGB was described as a Russian-emigre criminal enterprise that dealt in drugs, extortion and robbery.

Evgueni "Zheka" Pojilenko, an enforcer for a mob group that called itself "KGB" and operated primarily in Northeast Philadelphia, was convicted yesterday of racketeering charges that included drug dealing, extortion and robbery. Federal prosecutors described Pojilenko, 25, as "the muscle" behind the organization that preyed on drug dealers and users. Held without bail since he was arrested last year, Pojilenko faces 12 to 15 years in prison. One of 10 defendants charged in a sweeping indictment returned in April 2002, Pojilenko, of Brooklyn, was the only defendant to stand trial.

A painfully crafted guilty plea agreement with reputed Russian mob boss Leonid "Big Lenny" Chernyak came apart in federal court yesterday when he balked at incriminating alleged fellow members of the "KGB" gang. Chernyak's 76-page signed agreement, in which he was to have pleaded guilty to racketeering and naturalization fraud, had been filed and the 22-year-old Bustleton man was standing before U.S. District Judge R. Barclay Surrick when defense lawyer Donald F. Manno broke the news.

The sentencing of Pennsylvania businessman Edmond Pope to 20 years hard labor in a Moscow court on Wednesday was a Stalinesque throwback that sends worrying signals about the government of Vladimir Putin - and the resurgence of the former Soviet KGB. Pope, a retired U.S. naval intelligence officer turned businessman, was apparently trying to buy declassified Russian defense technology for commercial use in the West. The FSB (a KGB successor) accused him of espionage because he acquired plans for a high-speed torpedo.

New Jersey U.S. Senate candidate Jon S. Corzine has paid his personal attorney $200,000 for campaign activities that included using private detectives to investigate former Gov. Jim Florio, Corzine's Democratic opponent. In federal election filings last week, Corzine reported two $100,000 payments, one in April and one this month, to the New York law firm of Stanley S. Arkin for "legal services. " Arkin said part of the money was channeled through him to a New York investigative agency, the Mintz Group, which helped conduct an inquiry this year that included questioning people who worked for Florio in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Governor's Office.