SPIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000200980002-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 21, 2008
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: December 4, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO N REPORTS, INC.
PROGRAM First Camera
December 4, 1983 7:00 P.M.
STATION WRC-TV
NBC Network
Washington, D.C.
SUBJECT Spies
LLOYD DOBYNS: Our story is about spies, and the
location is here in Vienna.
There are a lot of spies in Vienna, ours and theirs.
This story is about one of ours pretending to be one of theirs.
His name was Nicholas Shadrin. He defected from the Soviet Union
in 1959 and disappeared from Vienna in 1975. The question is:
Was he kidnapped by the KGB, or did the CIA give him to them? We
don't have the answer, but looking for it has made a fascinating
story.
We know that story ended on Demceber 20th, 1975 in
Vienna. A naturalized American citizen was missing, and no one
seemed to want to find him.
In 1959 Nicholas Shadrin, the youngest destroyer
commander in the Soviet Navy, defected. He and Eva Gora (?)
crossed the Baltic from Poland to Sweden in an open boat, an
amazing bit of seamanship by Shadrin and a dreadful political
embarrassment for the Soviets.
They stayed briefly in Sweden. Mrs. Shadrin remembers
that when they decided to come to the United States, a Swedish
Navy commander warned them that the Americans were as callous as
the Soviets and would use and abandon Nick.
Their first stop in the United States was a CIA safe-
house on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Nick Shadrin became friendly
with the man who ran it, Pete Sevess (?).
Material supplied by Raclin N Rennrts Inc may he used for file and reference ourooses only. It may not be reproduced. sold or publicly demonstrated or exhibited.
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PETE SEVESS: As far as I'm concerned, he was one of the
most intelligent, most personable, finest people whom I had met
who had been in that particular category. I trusted him impli-
citly. Hell, I would have trusted my life in his hands.
DOBYNS: General Dan Graham, once head of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, thought highly of him.
GENERAL DANIEL GRAHAM: Oh, Shadrin was brilliant, as
far as I was concerned, a really fine naval officer for anybody's
navy. And he knew a lot more about what was going on in the
Soviet Navy, could interpret it much better than people, our own
people could because he'd been in the Soviet Navy.
7
So, he was extremely valuable to us in substantive
intelligence.
DOBYNS: In this 1960 news film, a slightly disguised
Nicholas Shadrin testified about Soviet intentions to the House
Committee on Un-American Activities. He warned that Soviet
leaders planned a surprise nuclear attack.
NICHOLAS SHADRIN: Soviet doctrine has been based on the
[unintelligible] of surprise attack in nuclear warfare.
DOBYNS: In the Soviet Union, Nicholas Shadrin was tried
in absentia and sentenced to death.
In Washington, the Shadrins settled in. He worked for
naval intelligence. She passed her licensing tests and became a
dentist.
For some reason, his Navy job ended in 1965. And after
six depressing months of doing nothing, he reluctantly took a
low-level analyst job with the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Shadrin's new office was in Washington's Old Post Office Build-
ing, where the FBI also had an office. It is possible to
speculate that the day Shadrin walked through the front door to
go to work, he was already unwittingly part of a complicated,
even fanciful scheme. Soon after he went to work, he was
recruited as an agent for the FBI and CIA to pretend to be an
agent fo,r the Soviet KGB.
Robert Kupperman, senior associate, Georgetown Center
for Strategic Studies.
ROBERT KUPPEMAN: Nick didn't want to do it. As I
understand it, people within the intelligence community finally
prevailed upon Nick's really abiding sense of patriotism to this
country to take what were extraordinary risks.
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You've got to remember this man was under death sent-
DOBYNS: What Shadrin did not know was that he would
take extraordinary risk to help a KGB agent who claimed he wanted
to work under cover for the United States. He was code-named
Igor, and he seemed too good to be true.
HENRY HURT: Of course espionage is a dirty business.
DOBYNS: Henry Hurt is a roving editor for Reader's
Digest who often reports on intelligence.
HURT: Igor jumped into the laps of U.S. intelligence
people during the summer of 1966. He was young. He was attached
to the Soviet Embassy. He came to us promising to be able to
open the coffers of KGB intelligence if we would only help him.
He was young enough to go back to Moscow and become our man in
Moscow. I think we looked -- we looked at Igor as a chance to
develop an agent who would serve us for decades.
Igor had one thing that he said he needed in order to
enhance his own credibility with the KGB, and that one thing he
needed was to recruit Nick Shadrin.
Nick Shadrin never knew that he was being used as a
piece of bait for Igor to take back to the KGB.
DOBYNS: In 1971 Shadrin went to Montreal to meet a KGB
agent. Double agents don't usually leave the country because it
is far more dangerous.
Later, there were two trips to Vienna with his wife.
MRS. SHADRIN: I was just delighted to go to Vienna.
DOBYNS: Mrs. Shadrin remembers the last trip to Vienna.
MRS. SHADRIN: On December 18th, '75, we arrived to
Vienna. It was just a beautiful day. And we made reservation in
the Bristol Hotel, and we arrived in the afternoon around three
o'clock. And Nick wanted to rest a little bit because that
evening at five o'clock he had the meeting, enough to look at the
Vienna just before Christmas with all its lights on and with the
proper atmosphere.
It was such a refreshing little excursion that I enjoyed
tremendously.
DOBYNS: On December 18th, 1975 at five o'clock,
Nicholas Shadrin had a meeting here on the steps of the Votive
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Church in the middle of Vienna. He told his wife he'd be meeting
a Russian who had worked for the United States for 25 years. It
was a good place for the two men to meet.
In those days, just over there, was the United States
Consulate. So intelligence officers could keep the two men under
surveillance. They could, but they didn't. The FBI says the CIA
should have, and the CIA says the FBI should have.
The two men went to this restaurant for their meeting.
MRS. SHADRIN: He was extremely excited about the
meeting. The meeting very well and they had wonderful dinner.
They had two vodkas. [Unintelligible] fine restaurant and
excellent dinner [unintelligible] that was prepared very well.
DOBYNS: In Room 361 at the Bristol, Mrs. Shadrin waited
for Nick. With he was Cynthia Houseman (?), a CIA agent known to
the Soviets. When Nick Shadrin returned from his meeting,
Houseman took him into the bathroom, apparently for a private
briefing about the meeting.
December 19th, 1975. Nick and Eva Shadrin did a little
shopping for New Year's, a Russian tradition. That evening they
went to the peformance at the State Opera House, across from the
Bristol Hotel.
MRS. SHADRIN: It was quite obvious that Nick didn't
enjoy the opera too much. Nick was sort of growing tense and
uneasy, and he mentioned to me he wants to sleep all night, as
long as, you know, he wants to, [unintelligible] the morning not
to wake him up too early. And he took some Valium.
DOBYNS: Saturday the Shadrins got up late and did some
casual sightseeing. Nick gave Eva the address and telephone
number where Cynthia Houseman would be, and told her to use them
if something happens.
MRS. SHADRIN: He left the room around 6:30. I asked
him how he will go. He said he probably will take a taxi. And I
-- strangely enough, I told him, "Take care of yourself." I
never did this before.
Eva Shadrin waited. Her nerve held until 1:30. Then
she tried to call agent Houseman. No answer. She did answer a
second call at 1:55. Her first question was whether Eva Shadrin
had tried to call her earlier.d
MRS. SHADRIN: I just knew something terrible had
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happened. Of course I didn't know that Nick would never be
coming. I said it will take time. At that point, I never said
that I'll never see him again.
DOBYNS: Three days later Mrs. Shadrin was told to go
home so that Nick could be reported missing to Austrian police.
But no report was ever made. Eva Shadrin was told to lie to
friends abaout where her missing husband was.
We now know that Igor, the KGB superspy, disappeared at
the same time.
Producer Pat Lynch talked to General Sam Wilson, former
Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
GENERAL SAM WILSON: Nick, to me, represents those poor
unfortunates who are caught between the clashing rocks of the two
different worlds, the Scylla and Charybdis. And unfortunately,
Nick got crushed when the rocks came together.
I would have to tell you that I had some ambivalence
about responding to your request for an interview, which I
carried with me into the room. But this one is for Nick and for
all the other Nick Shadrins who get involved in the struggle out
in that dark and dangerous sort of misty mid-region of clandes-
tine operations and espionage who are trying to do their thing to
further the concept of Thomas Jefferson concerning liberty.
PAT LYNCH: Was he betrayed?
GENERAL WILSON: I think he indirectly was betrayed. I
feel that when he agreed to meet with his Soviet case officer in
Vienna in December 1975 that clandestine operations' trade craft
requisite to such a situation was not exercised.
The thing that I feel rather badly about is that, in
effect, a man who had already suffered a great deal psychologic-
ally was sent out alone on a dark night into the winter streets
of the city of Vienna to meet his own executioner.
LYNCH: A security disaster?
GENERAL WILSON: A bungle. A sloppy operation. He had
no security, he had no protection, as the operation has been
briefed to me. I was not there. As I have been briefed, there
was no countersurveillance of his meeting. He was alone. He was
unprotected. And the Soviets simply fulfilled one of their basic
laws, which in shorthand reads, "Death to traitors."
ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER: There were definitely errors
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 made. I don't think they're quite as cut-and-dried as Sam Wilson
has made out.
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DOBYNS: Admiral Stansfield Turner, former Director of
ADMIRAL TURNER: I can't discuss them in detail because
I think it would be improper, it would be revealing of techniques
that we don't want to talk about in public. So I can only
summarize for you once again.
Yes, it wasn't a well-conducted affair on the part of
the CIA. It was not, in, my opinion, a gross negligence. It
wasn't an intentional issue, not one that I think required major
change.
MRS. SHADRIN: I am convinced that Nick was sacrificed
by United States for whatever reason they had in mind, as a
political or international. They just simply sacrificed Nick.
And he came to Vienna to disappear.
DOBYNS: On a radio talk show at that time, Mrs. Shadrin
questioned CIA Director William Colby.
MRS. SHADRIN: Did CIA kill my husband?
WILLIAM COLBY: I'm absolutely sure that CIA did not
kill your husband, Mrs. Shadrin. This case has been looked into
very carefully, as you well know. The FBI, I think, is the major
agency responsible for that activity. And I know that the CIA
was of some assistance to them, but that the responsible agency
was the FBI.
GENERAL GRAHAM: And it seems to me that the least that
the government can do after putting a man in a dangerous position
and then blowing an intelligence operation and allowing his --the
KGB to grab him, that the least they can do is let everybody know
that, yes, we goofed, and Nick Shadrin was a good man and we're
sorry to lose him. That seems to me the minimum that can be done
for Nick Shadrin.
KUPPERMAN: First, let's start off with a basic axiom.
This town is not courageous. Once a friend, later someone you
hardly knew. If anything goes wrong, you don't have many friends
that last here. And I think Nick suffered from that to begin
with.
ADMIRAL TURNER: I've only met Mr. Shadrin once. In
1972, or maybe early 1973, when I was President of the Navy's War
College in Newport, Rhode Island, one of the professors asked Mr.
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Shadrin to come up and conduct a seminar with some of our
stu-dents. While he was there, the professor brought him by my
office just for a quick visit.
MRS. SHADRIN: Nick dealt with a lot of people. A lot
of them were Navy people. One of the Navy people was Mr. Turner,
that Nick met quite a few times going to the Navy War College in
Rhode Island. And they had some telephone conversation and
exchange of letters.
SEVESS: I know he knew him because Nick would go down
to the War College and lecture. And, of course, I think he
stayed with Turner while he was out there. So Nick was in great
demand.
DOBYNS: It is the old question: Who did what to whom,
and who cares?
MRS. SHADRIN: After almost eight years, I would like to
know what happened to Nick. I would like to know what was done,
what happened, if he's alive. Just that I can sort everything in
my own mind. I'm not looking for revenge.
DOBYNS: We may never know with any certainty what
happened to Nicholas Shadrin. But whatever it was does not seem
to help us. Even if our government did absolutely nothing wrong,
the result was bad. A man who defected to us was not protected.
The Director of Security for the Central Intelligence
Agency once said, "If bodily harm were to come to a defector, it
would have a devastating impact on all potential defectors."
We cannot prove that Nicholas Shadrin was harmed. But
we have found no one willing to argue that he was helped.
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