DID YURCHENKO FOOL THE CIA?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000606040007-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 24, 2010
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: November 18, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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NEWSWEEK
18 November 1985
Did Yurchetow
Fool the CIA?
N e was trumpeted as one of the most
important defectors in years-a
career Soviet agent who, U.S. in-
telligence sources said, had risen
through the ranks to become dep-
uty director of KGB intelligence operations
in all of North America. A big fish, U.S.
officials said, the genuine article-a master
spy and a font of invaluable information
about Soviet tactics in the never-ending se-
cret war between the KGB and the CIA.
But last week the CIA's bubble burst wide
open-for in a startling news conference at
the Soviet Embassy in Washington, Vitaly
Sergeyevich Yurchenko, 49, announced his
redefection to the Soviet Union.
Speaking mostly in Russian and some-
times in heavily accented English, Yur-
chenko told a lurid tale that seemed de-
signed to make the CIA look like a gang of
incompetent thugs. He said he had been
kidnapped, drugged and kept in isolation at
a CIA safe house near Fredericksburg, Va.,
for three "horrible" months. His guards
were "fat" and "stupid" and his chief care-
taker was a "psychologically sick" Vietnam
veteran who seemed to "hate all humanity."
At one point he had been offered $1 million
to tell what he knew-and at another he was
taken to CIA headquarters in a drug-in-
duced "fog" to have dinner with CIA Direc-
tor William J. Casey. Finally, Yurchenko
said, he was "able to break out to freedom"
due to a "momentary lapse" by his captors.
He fled to the Soviet Embassy compound,
where he was welcomed back to the fold and
ordered to tell his story to the world-and
the worst of it for the CIA was that too
many of the details were true.
`Totally False': Yurchenko took off for
Moscow two days later, leaving embar-
rassed administration officials to wonder
what went wrong. For starters, the State
Department denied that he had been kid-
napped or coerced: Secretary of State
George Shultz, in Moscow for a round of
presummit meetings with party leader Mi-
khail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders
(page 48), said Yurchenko's charges of bru-
tality were "totally false." Other U.S. offi-
cials worried that the incident might poison
the atmosphere in Geneva, and some sug-
gested that Yurchenko may have been sent
by the KGB to mislead Ronald Reagan
about Soviet intentions at the summit. The
president's senior advisers maintained that
fear was groundless, however, and Reagan
himself said that Yurchenko's information
was "not anything new or sensational." But
in the wake of the diplomatic wrangle over
Ukrainian sailor Miroslav Medvid in New
Orleans, defector controversies seemed to
be part of a nerve-jangling buildup to the
summit (page 36). Reagan was struck by the
odd coincidence of three different Soviet
redefections in a single week. "You can't
rule out the possibility that this might have
been a deliberate ploy, a maneuver," Rea-
gan said. "[But] we just have to live with it."
Perhaps-but it was already plain that
Yurchenko's disappearance had thrown the
American intelligence community into tur-
moil. There was little doubt the CIA had
bungled: the only questions were how, and
how badly. If Yurchenko were a genuine
defector who had a genuine change of heart,
the agency was guilty of sloppy or amateur-
ish handling of a prized intelligence "asset."
But if, as Reagan implied, Yurchenko had
been a KGB plant all along, the damage was
far worse: CIA officials from top to bottom
had swallowed his story whole, and the
agency had suffered an embarrassing defeat
whose consequences might be felt for years.
There were hard questions ahead, careers
on the line and a widening search for scape-
goats that could, in the end, lead to a whole-
sale shake-up within the agency; the most
anyone would say last week was that the 72-
year-old Casey, a favorite of conservatives
and the president alike, was himselfljkely to
survive any impending purge. X
Meanwhile, the episode provided fasci-
nating glimpses of the secret world of espio-
nage-for if nothing else, the Yurchenko
case was a great spy yarn. U.S. intelligence
sources confirmed a number of hitherto-
secret details about the CIA's handling of
its lost defector. It was evidently true, for
example, that the agency had debriefed
Yurchenko in a private home ouside Fred-
ericksburg, and it was evidently true that
the agency at one point had offered him a $1
million bonus and a lifetime contract for his
cooperation. It was true that Yurchenko
met with Casey, and it was true that he had
"escaped" from the agency's custody by
giving his handler the slip. Sources also
confirmed a melodramatic wrinkle the de-
fector failed to mention to the press: that
Yurchenko was pursuing a longtime ro-
mance with the wife of a Soviet diplomat
stationed in Canada, and that he had appar-
ently changed his mind when his mistress
refused to defect with him.
`Flying Colors': The bare outlines of
Yurchenko's story, so far as it was known,
suggested that his journey to America had
been anything but a kidnapping-and in-
deed, there was every indication that he had
been treated with extravagant hospitality.
According to the State Department, Yur-
chenko voluntarily defected to the U.S.
Embassy in Rome on Aug. 1. Sometime
thereafter he was flown to the United States,
where Yurchenko said he was guarded by a
six-man team headed by a CIA employee
named Colin Thompson. Yurchenko sub-
mitted to a battery of lie-detector tests and
passed, according to Reagan administra-
tion sources, "with flying colors." He and
his guards reportedly were sequestered for
the duration of his interrogation in a "safe
house" outside Fredericksburg, an easy
commute from CIA headquarters in Lang-
ley, Va. The rented house, a comfortable
modern Colonial, sits on a secluded lot
in a sparsely developed subdivision called
Coventry.
To hear Yurchenko tell it, the CIA had
indeed sent him to Coventry-for one of his
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biggest complaints was that he "did not
have any chance to speak Russian." His
press-conference allegations that the CIA
kidnapped, tortured and drugged him,
however, were a near-perfect rendition of
Soviet propaganda, and a CIA spokesman,
in a rare on-the-record statement, said Yur-
chenko's version of events was "a fairy
tale." "When you are in such isolation, you
are helpless," he told reporters. "Nobody
pays attention to what you are protesting.
And even if I try to commit suicide they
won't give me such chance to escape. Be-
cause 24 hours, even when I was sleeping,
they prohibited even to close the door. And
[in the] next room was sitting such [a] fat,
quiet, stupid, excuse me, nonemotional per-
son ... if I tried to close the door he immedi-
ately opened the door and [was] sitting
[watching] TV. I practically don't have nor-
mal rest or sleep." Chief interrogator
Thompson, he said, was a "veteran in Viet-
nam, he was wounded. It seemed to me he
was [a] killer, too, and it seems to me he has
The safe house in Coventry: Secret chic
continued to do the same thing here."
Thompson "hate[s] all humanity," Yur
chenko said, "because he is a psycholog
ically sick person." (A CIA spokesman
said, "We stand by our men.")
His handlers, Yurchenko said, used
combination of threats and promises to sof
ten him up. At times, he said, they warners
him, "If you flee and return to the Sovie
Union anyway, a prison and death is await
ing you. We'll send the KGB all the materi
als we got from you, and you will be jailers
there." At other times they offered him
lucrative contract as a CIA consultant. "
was supposed to get $1 million beginnin;
Nov. 1 ... as a down payment. And to the
end of my life they were going to pay me
annually $62,500, and that sum would grow
taking into account inflation," he said. The
agreement included fringe benefits as well:
free medical care for life and all the furni-
ture in the rented safe house, which cost the
CIA $48,000. All told, Yurchenko said, he
would be paid something like $180,000 a
year-which is more, he said, "than the
income of the U.S. president when he
retires."
They also tried to help him with his love
life. Yurchenko has a wife, a married
daughter and a 16-year-old adopted son in
the Soviet Union-but he told the CIA he
wanted to start a new life in the United
States with a longtime lady friend, whom he
identified as the wife of a Soviet diplomat
stationed in Canada. Trying desperately to
keep him happy, the CIA team reportedly
took Yurchenko north in late September for
a tryst with the diplomat's wife. They drove
to Ottawa, where the diplomat is stationed.
But the diplomat's wife spurned the over-
ture-and, according to one source, "that
was a big disappointment" to Yurchenko.0
Big Policy: The debriefing seemed to go
badly after that. Intelligence sources insist
that Yurchenko provided much valuable
information early on-but they concede
that he clammed up during the last five
weeks of his captivity. Yurchenko said he
gave them no information at all unless he
was drugged-which he implied was much
of the time. He said he was drugged, for
instance, when his handlers took him to
CIA headquarters in Langley to have din-
ner with Casey. "I remember that I was
brought to the main building ... and that I
was taken by elevator to the seventh floor to
Mr. Casey's office," he said. "That was the
point of the strongest effect of the drug, [so]
that when Mr. Casey entered the office I did
not recognize him. I rose, greeted him and
later we went to Mr. Casey's dining room
and had dinner." Their talk, he scoffed,
"was kind of general conversation of big
policy issues regarding the summit-things
which they usually write about in the
newspapers."
By October Yurchenko was banging on
the bars of his golden cage. He was dis-
tressed, he said, that his case had attracted
so much attention in the media, and he was
even more distressed that the CIA passed
along a number of letters from reporters
sking him questions about the information
e had given. Burton Gerber, chief of the
IA's Soviet desk, played middleman for
he media. "Alex, we have received many
equests from our media-NBC, ABC
ompanies would like to speak with you,"
'urchenko recalled Gerber telling him. "I
nswered him, 'Mr. Gerber, I'm not ready
ow'." Yurchenko was particularly trou-
led by a Washington Post story saying he
ad confirmed that the KGB had kid-
apped and killed double agent Nicholas
hadrin in Vienna in 1975. Shadrin's widow
suing the CIA for damages; Yurchenko
thought he would be called to testify. "I
asked Mr, Gerber, 'Aren't you ashamed? I
will be taken to an American court .. .
because it seems to me I'm going to be the
only witness for that.' And [Gerber] told
.U.S. and Canadian officials denied that the death of a
Soviet trade official's wife in Toronto last week had any
connection to the Yurchenko case. The Russian woman, an
apparent suicide, fell to her death the day before Yurchenko
flew back to Moscow; a Soviet spokesman said she had been
under treatment for depression for some time.
me, 'Don't worry, we'll settle everything.
The main thing is to influence people'."
The uneasy rapport with his warders van-
ished. On one occasion, when the safe house
had women visitors, Yurchenko noticed
one of the guards sitting with his feet upon a
cocktail table, jacket thrown open to reveal
his gun. "From my point of view, to sit
together with some ladies [with] his gun
open and his feets on the table ... it's not
polite," Yurchenko said. "I said, 'What are
you doing?' And he-that's his mentality-
he said, 'Oh, I understand, it's your furni-
ture.' He decided I am worrying about (the
furniture] because they know all about the
agreement. He respects private property
and immediately takes a piece of paper and
began to polish" the table.
`Not Your Fault': Yurchenko's "break-
out" came on Nov. 2-but it was hardly a
great escape. In fact, he was having dinner
at a restaurant in Washington with a single
CIA handler when, according to sources,
the defector simply walked away. The res-
taurant, Au Pied de Cochon, is a popular
Georgetown bistro much frequented by the
city's international crowd; it was so crowd-
ed on the evening of Nov. 2, according to
owner Yves Courbois, that Yurchenko and
his companion must have waited in line for
at least 10 minutes to get a table. The two
men ate dinner without attracting the atten-
tion of Courbois's staff, which suggests that
the ensuing drama was strictly low key.
Yurchenko waited to spring his surprise
until the CIA man was picking up the
check. "What would you do if I got up and
walked out? Would you shoot me?" he re-
portedly asked. "No, we don't treat defec-
tors that way," the CIA man replied. "I'll be
back in 15 or 20 minutes," Yurchenko said.
"If I'm not, it's not your fault."
To U.S. intelligence experts, Yurchen-
ko's litany of accusations and complaints
was nothing more than blatant Soviet prop-
aganda. His three main charges-that he
was kidnapped, tortured and drugged-
were ludicrous, they said. "Anybody who
has eyes, ears and half a brain knows that his
account of being drugged, kidnapped and
tortured was made up of whole cloth," says
former CIA man George Carver. In truth,
Carver and other experts say, strong-arm
methods gain little in defection cases-for
the subject will either resist interrogation or
fabricate what he thinks his interrogators
want to hear. The use of truth serums, by the
same token, is said to be largely myth. There
are legal, ethical and moral problems, says
one CIA veteran, but the agency doesn't use
drugs-even sodium pentothal-because
they usually don't work. "If there's some-
thing down deep inside someone's psyche,
drugs won't get it out," this source says.
"You're not going to get a guy's brain to tell
you something he doesn't want to tell you."
Debriefing a defector, particularly a
knowledgeable agent like Yurchenko, is
essentially a process of eliciting his volun-
tary cooperation-though carrot-and-stick
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pressure, such as Yurchenko described,
may well be used. The stick is mostly bluff:
the CIA has no real sanctions, legal or
otherwise, that it can use. That means CIA
interrogators must bank heavily on using
the carrot-and Yurchenko's debriefing,
despite his :many complaints, illustrates
that fact well. He was housed in comfort,
nursed through his romantic problems and
offered the CIA's equivalent of the golden
handshake: all in all, a senior U.S. official
says, he was treated "like a colleague."
Indeed, most of the CIA's critics now say
the agency should have coddled him even
more. Carver says the interrogation team
should have provided a Russian-speaking
"babysitter"-someone who could play
chess, drink vodka and swap dirty stories by
the hour; someone who knows the Russian
soul and the defector's mind. Another mis-
take, according to Carver, was the Reagan
administration's eagerness to publicize its
prize catch. "Yurchenko was ticked off at
the way his information was leaked, and he
was ticked off not only in the abstract but in
the sense that he may have seen the leaks as
having a direct bearing on the situation of
his wife and family," Carver says. "But the
very fact that we had a senior defector
shouldn't have been blabbed, and the little
nuggets he provided shouldn't have been
spread over the networks and the newspa-
pers the way they were. We should have
absolutely stonewalled on this guy."
In a Funk: Most of all, these critics say,
the CIA team failed to ease Yurchenko
through a wholly predictable bout of the
defector blues (page 40). Like most Soviet
turncoats, Yurchenko seemed to have been
motivated by a combination of disillusion-
ment with the Soviet system and personal
problems. He "hated his wife, hated his two
kids, hated the system," one official says. As
a result, the theory goes, his lady friend's
rejection came as a crushing blow that led
Yurchenko to reconsider his defection.
"My personal opinion was always that he
was in a tough emotional state and maybe
... that he wasn't handled as well as he
could have been," says Sen. Dave Duren-
berger, a member of the Senate Select Intel-
ligence Committee. "We could see for the
last five weeks that he was in that kind of
funk." Given his mood, this theory goes, the
probability that he would be jailed or pun-
ished by the KGB was not enough to deter
his redefection: just last year another Soviet
defector, journalist Oleg Bitov, apparently
redefected without disappearing into the
Gulag. Bitov returned to Moscow, claiming
he had been kidnapped and coerced by Brit-
ish intelligence agents-similar to Yur-
chenko's allegations last week.
The fact remains, however, that all of this
psychologizing may be wholly beside the
point-for there are those who simply do not
believe that Yurchenko was ever a genuine
defector. In their view, his crossover in
Rome was only the beginning of a deliberate
KGB maneuver to spread "disinformation"
among U.S. policymakers on the eve of the
Reagan-Gorbachev summit. Another ob-
jective could have been to humiliate and
disrupt the CIA.* Yurchenko's dramatic
redefection, they say, was merely the final
act-a propaganda charade made all the
more clever by his selective use of the truth.
"What he did was to take the truth and ...
subject it to ridicule and satire," one coun-
terintelligence veteran says. "[It] was for the
purpose of embarrassing and immobilizing
the rank and file at the CIA." Republican
Sen. William S. Cohen says Yurchenko's
defection to the CIA "seemed too conven-
ient. But they were riding a wave of euphoria
out at Langley-they had landed the biggest
fish of all time, and they were eager to
proceed." Another skeptic, Democratic
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, says, "The worst
possible case is that [Yurchenko] was a dou-
ble agent who was sent out to embarrass and
disrupt the CIA." If so, Leahy says, "this
was a real calamity" that casts serious doubt
on the CIA's methods for verifying defector
information. "Personally," Leahy adds, "I
think he was a plant. I hope I'm wrong."
'One of the more exotic theories about why the KGB
may have sent Yurchenko to defect involves Oleg Gor-
diyevsky, head of the KGB in London and a double agent
who defected in London last summer. Just before his defec-
tion, Gordiyevsky was recalled to KGB headquarters in
Moscow for "consultations" and, according to a BBC
documentary airing this week, British agents somehow
managed to rescue him from within the Soviet Union
itself-a brilliant bit ofderring-do and a bitter defeat for the
KGB. Seen against that background, the Yurchenko case
may have been the KGB's way of getting even-and its
attempt to force Western intelligence agencies to be more
cautious in recruiting future defectors.
Ottawa tryst:
Despite the CIA's
help, the lady said no
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The truth about Yur-
chenko may never be
known-though the de-
bate is almost guaran-
teed to continue for
many months to come.
In the meantime the CIA
is sticking to its guns:
Yurchenko was a genu-
ine defector, sources say,
and a valuable one. "The
main reason to believe he
wasn't a plant is that
he brought information
that he wouldn't have
given if he were a plant,"
one official says. "He
gave us a great deal."
Yurchenko is said to
have tipped the CIA to
Edward L. Howard, a
disgruntled former agen-
cy employee who gave
the KGB crucial infor-
mation leading to a Rus-
sian scientist spying for
the CIA. Howard disap-
peared last September
from his home in New
Mexico, presumably for
the Soviet Union. Iron-
ically, however, Yur- Under guard. No pri vacy-and a fat, stupid'handler
chenko's redefection has
now undermined the FBI's case against
Howard. "We didn't have a case before, and
now we have even less of one," a Justice
Department official said.
Even senior officials conced-
ed, however, that Yurchenko
should have been more tight-
ly guarded that night at
the Georgetown restaurant-
and one official promises that the
agency will now "take a good
look" at the whole Yurchenko
affair, including the basic ques-
tion of whether Yurchenko's de-
fection was genuine. Leahy
would like "a real hard look" at
Yurchenko's bona fides and the
CIA's handling of the case, with
an impartial "ombudsman" con-
ducting the review. Others say
the agency must improve its
counterintelligence arm, which
would be the CIA's first line of
defense against a phony defec-
tor. "Casey is not in trouble un-
less he fails to make some
changes out there," says Sen.
Malcolm Wallop. In the Yur-
chenko case, he adds, the CIA
professionals "weren't humble
enough to believe they could
be fooled."
The agency is under fire on
another front as well. The rea-
son: the leaked disclosure of a
top-secret CIA plan to under-
mine Libyan strongman Muam-
mar Kaddafi, which appeared in
The Washington Post the day before Yur-
chenko's press conference. The Post story
outlined a 29-page "vulnerability assess-
ment" compiled by the CIA in 1984; the
report concluded that Libyan dissidents
"could be spurred to assassination at-
tempts" on Kaddafi if he became entangled
in some foreign adventure. The CIA pro-
posed a broad campaign of covert political
and paramilitary action in concert with un-
named third countries to bring that about-
and the president, according to the Post, has
already approved the plan. Last week Rea-
gan ordered a full-bore investigation into
the damaging leak, but the controversy is
far from over.
Political Target: The bottom line on a
turbulent week is that the CIA may become
a political target again, much as it was in the
1970s, when liberals uncovered the dark
secrets of its assassination attempts and do-
mestic spying. Now, however, it is conser-
vatives who are pushing the agency to get
tough in the cold war against Soviet espio-
nage-and the Yurchenko debacle may be
just enough to give the hawks what they
want, which is a selective purge within Ca-
sey's senior staff. Even if such a shake-up
could strengthen the CIA in the long run, it
would almost certainly entail short-term
trauma for the agency. And that may be
why Yurchenko, leaving the State Depart-
ment on the eve of his return to Moscow,
clasped both hands above his head in a
gesture of triumph.
TOM MORGANTHAU with KIM WILLENSON,
RICHARD SANDZA and JOHN WALCOTT
in Washington and bureau V ports
S -S
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