A Spy Who Fooled No One Is Repentant : Soviet Union: KGB agent who chauffeured seven consecutive British ambassadors describes his double life in the latest slap at the agency.

By CAREY GOLDBERG

Oct. 31, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MOSCOW — Konstantin Demakhin never fooled anyone, of course. When he drove seven consecutive British ambassadors around Moscow, none was ever naive enough to let any state secrets slip to a chauffeur who might as well have worn a “KGB stamp of approval” on his forehead.

Still, Demakhin’s decision to publicly repent his double life as a KGB informer--culminating on Wednesday in a press conference at the Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper offices--marked a new stage in Soviet efforts to rid their society of the intelligence agency’s decades-old penetration.

“If we don’t despise who we were, there will never be a foundation for the great changes that we’re encountering now,” Demakhin told reporters, explaining the loud splash he is intentionally making with his story. “These changes have to come in us. Many people will recognize themselves in this story. It’s the masses on which the monster of the KGB grew.”

A fit-looking man in heavy glasses and a black leather jacket that gave him a quintessentially Soviet look, Demakhin said the KGB had asked him to inform on the activities and possible weak spots of all embassy employees he met--”Whether someone was a ladies’ man, a money-grubber, a skinflint.” He said he had once tried to recruit one of his British friends.

Although past Soviet spies have spilled their secrets after defecting, and renegade KGB Gen. Oleg Kalugin has disclosed much of the agency’s workings since he surfaced last year, Demakhin is the first run-of-the-mill informer--and the first embassy employee--to confess for the media.

Yuri Shekochikhin, the Literaturnaya Gazeta reporter whose two-part interview with Demakhin appeared last week and this Wednesday, said that because foreigners assume their Soviet employees all report to the KGB anyway, “This is no revelation for anyone. But it’s said for the first time without fear.”

The KGB, as it existed before this August’s failed coup attempt, was a vast, shadowy organization that was believed to have had networks of stool pigeons almost everywhere. But it is already largely gone, split into separate arms and undergoing radical changes by its new liberal chief.

Demakhin, however, said he has heard that the school for KGB officers in his neighborhood has a record number of freshmen this year and that he has yet to hear of any mass layoffs in the agency.

“The KGB has rotted as badly as our Communist future,” he said, adding that he believes that his own effectiveness for the KGB had been “zero,” and though he first decided to go public because of fear for his own life, he is no longer afraid.

Demakhin never went to KGB school, but his father worked for the KGB’s predecessor, known as the NKVD, according to the lengthy account in Literaturnaya Gazeta. Though his father warned him never to get involved with the KGB, Demakhin was recruited while still a student at a Moscow engineering institute. He believes that the KGB kept close tabs on him as a former employee’s son all through his life.

As an informer, he kept an eye on Americans he chauffeured around for Soviet travel agencies. Eventually, thanks to KGB patronage, he was given the job as the driver of the British ambassador’s Rolls-Royce.

Under a rigid system that has now loosened, foreigners in Moscow were long not allowed to choose their own drivers, nannies, translators, janitors and even apartments; they had to accept those provided them by a bureaucratic agency known as UPDK, the Russian acronym for the Diplomatic Corps Service Bureau. Foreigners, thus, automatically assumed that Soviet workers they were forced to hire were all foisted on them by the KGB. Demakhin’s confession confirmed many of their longstanding suspicions.

He said he could not speak for all of his co-workers at the embassy but that it was absolutely clear from the hiring process, in which documents are “sent away for a long time,” that “everyone who signs on is ready to be a stool pigeon. Everyone--otherwise they won’t be accepted.”

Virtually all Soviet employees in the U.S. Embassy were replaced by Americans in 1986, just months before the scandal broke about Marine guards seduced by comely Russian women who traded sex for secrets.

Demakhin, 51, said he did not believe anything that he did ever directly damaged any British Embassy employees and that he had been acting out of patriotism that has since waned, along with his respect for the KGB’s effectiveness. But asked directly whether he felt bad about the informing he did, he said, “I do, I do. . . .”

The British ambassador, Rodric Q. Braithwaite, apparently feels bad about it, too. Braithwaite--who has been getting scads of calls about his chauffeur’s public mea culpa --reportedly told Demakhin he wished the driver had discussed his plans for all his publicity with the embassy staff first.

But in one of the stranger twists of his story, Demakhin, now that he has confessed, will not be fired, embassy officials said. They noted that he has given up his wrongdoing. And he’s quite a good driver.