CONGRESS TO STUDY CIA HANDLING OF KGB OFFICIAL'S RE-DEFECTION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000303570021-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 26, 2010
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: November 6, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/26: CIA-RDP90-00552R000303570021-2
ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PAGE 31Z
WALL STREET JOURNAL
6 November 1985
INTERNATIONAL
Congress to Study CIA Handling
Of KGB Official's Re-Defection
WASHINGTON-Members of the House
and Senate Intelligence committees. say
their panels plan to conduct lengthy inves-
tigations of the Central Intelligence
Agency's handling of the surprise re-defec-
tion of Vitaly Yurchenko, a former KGB
official.
CIA officials held a round of briefings
with lawmakers yesterday explaining that
Mr. Yurchenko, former deputy chief of the
KGB's North American desk, was in this
I.j
This article was prepared by John
J. Fialka, David Shribrnan and Rob-
ert S. Greenberger.
city's crowded Georgetown area Saturday
evening to have dinner with CIA agents at
a small French restaurant, Au Pied de Co-
chon. He excused himself and then appar-
ently walked or was taken a few blocks up
the street to the newly built Soviet com-
pound.
"You've either got a defector who was
allowed to just walk away under circum-
stances I can't ac-
cept or you have a
double agent planted
on the U.S.," said
Sen. Patrick Leahy
(D., Vt.), vice chair-
man of the Senate
Select Committee on
Intelligence. "No
matter what, some-
thing is wrong."
Senatecommittee
members were told
that, before the din-
ner. Mr. Yurchenko Vitaly Yurchenko
appeared to be de-
pressed. There was some speculation that
the depression may have been related to
Mr. Yurchenko's relationship with a
woman who reportedly lives in Canada.
CIA officials indicated during the brief-
ings that they were still unsure whether
Mr. Yurchenko voluntarily went to the So-
viets or whether he was, somehow, recap-
tured by Soviet agents waiting for him in
the busy Saturday night crowd.
Meanwhile. U.S. officials debriefed Mr.
Yurchenko one more time at the State De-
partment last evening and determined he
had decided to leave the U.S. under his
own free will and that he did not appear to
be drugged. Mr. Yurchenko left the State
Department in a jubilant mood, holding his
hands above his head prize-fighter fashion
for waiting television crews. Asked
whether he was going to return to Russia,
he said: "Yes, home."
CIA Screening Process
Senate committee members said one of
the facets of the strange Yurchenko case
that they want to examine closely is how
the CIA determined that he was a credible
defector in the first place. "It's safe to say
we're going to want some of the specifics
of the screening process," said one Senate
committee member, referring to psycho-
logical tests and lie-detector examinations
that the CIA says it used on Mr. Yur-
chenko.
The CIA's debriefing of Mr. Yurchenko,
who had an overview of the heavily com-
partmentalized KGB operations in North
America, had been expected to take more
than a year, according to Reagan adminis-
tration sources. Periodically, information
taken from Yurchenko debriefings was
served up at closed hearings to Intelli-
gence Committee members as proof that
the CIA was getting an unprecedented
windfall of new spy information.
Yesterday, several congressmen said
they had been suspicious all along about
Mr. Yurchenko's testimony. "We're not ex-
perienced in this. We're laymen," said
Sen. William Cohen (R., Maine) "but
something struck us as not being right.
They (the CIA) reassured us, but there
were lingering doubts."
`Everybody Was Skeptical'
"Everybody was skeptical," said Sen.
Leahy. "The stuff seemed either we were
awfully, awfully lucky or he (Mr. Yur-
chenkol was too good to be true. Now it
turns out it was too good to be true. The
feeling here is that the CIA was had, and
not only the Congress, but the White House
had better ask some very serious ques-
tions."
"It's not a goof-up, it's not a great trag-
edy. It's like someone giving you a bag of
candy and taking half of it back," said
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman
David Durenberger 1R.. Minn.).
And not everything Mr. Yurchenko gave
his interrogators turned out'to be candy.
While his ability to reveal Edward L. How-
ard-a former CIA agent who allegedly
gave the Soviets secrets about U.S. opera-
tions in Moscow-was touted on Capitol
Hill, the Howard case wasn't particularly
sweet for the CIA.
One problem was that Mr. Howard ap-
parently was given advance warning about
CIA and Federal Bureau of Investigation
interest in him and managed to escape ar-
rest. Another was that Mr. Howard had
been fired from the CIA in 1983 in a man-
ner that had reportedly left him so angry
that he threatened to disclose U.S. secrets
to Moscow. A third problem was that Mr.
Howard was given sensitive information on
U.S. spies in Moscow during what should
have been a two-year period of probation
and basic training in intelligence.
Adm. Stansfield Turner, director of the
CIA during the Carter administration, said
he changed an old CIA rule that required
agency officials to minimize firings and to
simply move agents who had "gone sour"
to less sensitive positions until their prob-
lems could be addressed. The change, ac-
cording to Adm. Turner, was made to de-
crease the danger of moles, or high-level
enemy agents within the agency.
Adm. Turner said he wonders how a
trainee like Mr. Howard could have ac-
quired sensitive information in the first
place. "There's something screwy about
that," he said.
The White House still seemed to be in a
state of shock over the surprise re-defec-
tion of Mr. Yurchenko, but an administra-
tion spokesman insisted it would have little
effect on this month's summit meeting in
Geneva.
The Yurchenko matter was discussed
during the White House's morning briefing,
but only as another item," one aide
noted. The aide said he didn't expect the
incident to spill over into domestic poli-
tics, adding: The American public be-
lieves you can't trust the Russians from
here to the door anyway. This just under-
scores that.''
STAT
STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/26: CIA-RDP90-00552R000303570021-2