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Georgia Internal Security
The Georgian internal security agency with the closest ties
to Moscow was the Georgian branch of the Committee for State
Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti--KGB). Beginning
in 1990, the anticommunist independence movement exerted direct
pressure on the Georgian KGB to accept independence. The first
confrontation between Moscow and the Gamsakhurdia government came
over appointments to top security posts in the republic. In
November 1990, the Georgian parliamentary Commission on Security
broke the tradition of Moscow-designated KGB chiefs by naming its
own appointee. When Gorbachev threatened dire consequences,
Gamsakhurdia simply left the chairmanship vacant but named his
candidate first deputy chairman and thus acting chairman. At that
point, top Georgian KGB officials voiced support for Gamsakhurdia
and protested Gorbachev's interference, signaling a service
commitment to Tbilisi rather than Moscow.
As late as mid-1991, Moscow continued financing activities of
the Georgian KGB and provided part of the budget of the Georgian
Ministry of Internal Affairs, which ran domestic intelligence and
police agencies. Meanwhile, by 1991 the opposition to
Gamsakhurdia was accusing the president of using the Georgian KGB
to investigate and harass political enemies.
In May 1992, the Georgian KGB, which in the interim had been
renamed the Ministry of Security, was formally replaced by the
Information and Intelligence Service. The new agency, formed on
the organizational foundation of the old KGB, was headed by
Irakli Batiashvili, a thirty-year-old philosophy scholar who had
been a National Democratic Party delegate to the National
Congress.
Data as of March 1994
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