Recruiting an Agent

A Hollywood producer is betting that Americans, after decades of seeing KGB agents as the bad guys, are ready to hear the other side of the story. Independent producer Brian Litman just returned from Moscow with a deal to represent 500 retired KGB officers for book and movie deals. ''There are some stories that make James Bond look tame,'' he boasts. Among the projects Litman is peddling:

+ A movie about how the Soviets procured U.S. atomic weapons technology in the 1950s. (Litman says ''it will establish what, if any, role (Julius and Ethel) Rosenberg may have had,'' but he won't divulge details.)
+ A book detailing a KGB colonel's interrogation of Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City two months before the JFK assassination.

+ A book by the KGB operative who controlled the ''Cambridge 5'' spy ring in Great Britain, including the traitors Donald MacLean, Anthony Blunt, and Kim Philby.

Retired KGB colonel Mikhail Petrovich Lyubimov, who was expelled from Great Britain in the '60s for spying, says the portrayal of KGB officers in Hollywood movies has always made him feel ''shocked and humiliated.''

''I know many people in the CIA were very nice chaps,'' says Lyubimov. ''The KGB people are usually shown as inhuman, foolish people.'' To help correct that view, the colonel knows who should portray him on screen: Sean Connery. ''He looks very Russian,'' says Lyubimov.