In the month that he has been on trial for treason, Oleg D. Kalugin has spent weekends at his Ocean City condo with his daughter and 12-year-old grandson, who are visiting from Moscow. He has gone for his usual long-distance ocean swims.
Back in Washington, the former KGB major general has lectured as usual on Russian politics and intelligence, tended to his consulting business and tried out the new Fresh Fields near his Silver Spring home.
And occasionally, Kalugin, 67, has checked the Web for the latest word on his closed trial in Moscow, where he is represented by a lawyer with whom he has never spoken and where a three- judge panel is expected to hand down his sentence today. The prosecutor is asking for 20 years.
"I'm not concerned," Kalugin said yesterday, spending a peaceful day off in his quiet suburban neighborhood. "I'm not guilty. My conscience is not burdened. And I live in the United States, which has no treaty of extradition with Russia."
His trial, Kalugin says, "is an act of political vengeance," the settling of an old score. "I was never a defector. I never betrayed Russia. But I did what I could to destroy that monster, the KGB."
Kalugin says he has seen Internet postings from Russians who suggest that he be kidnapped, poisoned or perhaps killed with an ice ax - the fate arranged long ago by Josef Stalin for exiled rival Leon Trotsky.
"Really, I think it's just talk," Kalugin says.
The charges against Kalugin, apparently triggered by his testimony last year in a U.S. spy trial, are one more indication of how President Vladimir V. Putin, a career KGB officer, has restored the clout of the security services. Severely tarnished in the late 1980s by media revelations, the KGB received a crushing blow in 1991 when its then-chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, was jailed for leading the abortive coup against reformist President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
But Putin has demonstrated his respect for what he calls the "proud traditions" of the KGB. In January, when he held a Kremlin celebration of Vladimir I. Lenin's founding of the Soviet security services, Kryuchkov sat in the first row.
"I think Kalugin's trial is important," said Amy W. Knight, author of several books on the KGB and adjunct professor at Carleton University in Ontario. "It shows that for all of Putin's so-called reformism and his forward approach to the West, the security services wield a lot of influence."
