Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, from his first trip to the Soviet Union in 1974, was a highly prized and closely watched guest, enjoying "confidential" conversations with top leaders arranged by a KGB "competent source," according to KGB files.
The reports, contained in a dossier of correspondence between the KGB's Secretariat and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, were briefly made available to independent researchers at the end of last year.
According to the reports, the "competent source" was a "prominent Western financier" identified as D. Carr. [sic -- see correction to Karr below]
Carr was the head of a Franco-American firm called Finatech. Judging from the KGB dossier, he enjoyed enough clout in the Kremlin to arrange meetings between Kennedy and Soviet leaders.
A Kennedy spokesman said yesterday that the late David Carr was an American businessman in Moscow who knew the senator but did not set meetings for him.
The reports were briefly made available to independent researchers at the end of last year as the Soviet Union was collapsing. The KGB, fearing it was about to be dismantled, tried to cooperate with a parliamentary investigation into its role in the August 1991 coup.
Kennedy's conversations with Soviet leaders, from the former general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, to KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, who is awaiting trial for his part in last August's attempted coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev, sometimes appear to have involved personal as well as political matters.
In 1978, for example, the dossier describes Kennedy as trying to help a close friend, former Sen. John Tunney of California, get some business in the Soviet Union.
"Kennedy requested the KGB to help smooth the cooperation of Soviet organizations with Agritech, a company headed by former Senator J. Tunney," the report read, according to notes taken by Yevgeniya Albats, a writer and specialist on the KGB who was one of the specialists assigned by the Russian Parliament to work through the archives.
Kennedy, who made four trips to the Soviet Union, most recently in 1990, denied asking either the KGB or other Soviet officials to help Tunney, the senator's spokesman, Paul Donovan, said yesterday.
"Any suggestion that Senator Kennedy met with KGB officials to promote a friend's business interests is preposterous," Donovan said in a prepared statement. "He never even knowingly met with the KGB on his 1978 trip. Whoever is writing these KGB memos must have quite an imagination."
Tunney did not return a call to his office in Los Angeles.
The notes taken on the KGB reports by Albats coincide with those taken independently by another specialist, a historian who requested anonymity.
"In its turn this firm is connected to the French-American firm of Finatech SA (societe anonyme), which is headed by a competent source of the KGB, the prominent Western financier D. Carr, with whose help a confidential exchange of opinions has been arranged over the last several years between the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Senator Edward Kennedy. D. Carr provided technical information for the KGB on the situation in the USA and other capitalist countries which was regularly reported to the Central Committee of the CPSU," the report said.
Kennedy and Tunney became close friends while studying law at the University of Virginia; Kennedy is credited with getting Tunney interested in politics. Tunney served one term as Democratic senator from California from 1971 to 1977.
The information on Kennedy consisted of a little over one typed page and took the form of a summary of Kennedy's visits to the Soviet Union, intended for the Communist Party Central Committee and signed by Kryuchkov. There were no details of the "confidential exchanges of views" between Kennedy and Brezhnev, who died in 1982.
Researchers also found a transcript about 10 pages long of a meeting between Kennedy and Kryuchkov in 1990. Both Albats and the historian who examined it stressed that the transcript contained nothing that could embarrass Kennedy.
"It could be published tomorrow," one of the sources said. "They discussed disarmament, the need for democracy and Kennedy told them not to pressure the Baltic states," he said.
Though the Kennedy material was already included in a file marked "top secret," it was in turn enclosed in a sealed envelope. The beige-brown envelope had, however, come undone. "I think they must have used poor-quality glue," Albats said.
Researchers found several such envelopes during their brief perusal of the Secretariat files. All those examined concealed material considered especially sensitive - such as reports on the surveillance of Boris Yeltsin, now the president of Russia, and his close associates in the last years of perestroika.
The Secretariat file itself was a mine of information.
The KGB Secretariat was "a very important body," said retired KGB Col. Mikhail Lyubimov. "It's the main department through which all papers move." Lyubimov, who worked on the foreign intelligence side of the KGB and specialized in the English-speaking world, said that in his experience, the kind of information kept on Kennedy was the exception rather than the rule. The term competent source, Lyubimov said, is an "elastic, vague term," covering anything from a valuable source to a casual communicant. It did not indicate that Carr was an agent.
Among other dossiers the researchers found was a report from Kryuchkov to Gorbachev, dated February 1990, saying that North Korea was "actively engaged" in nuclear weapons research and had already completed work on its first atomic explosive device.
CORRECTION-DATE: June 26, 1992, Friday, City Edition
CORRECTION: Because of an error in a researcher's notes on KGB files, the name of the late David Karr was misspelled in a Page 1 story yesterday on the file kept by the KGB on Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.
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