KGB OFFICIAL SAYS HE DIDN'T DEFECT, ACCUSES U.S. AGENTS OF KIDNAPPING HIM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000606040012-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 24, 2010
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: November 5, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2010/08/24: CIA-RDP90-00552R000606040012-4
ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PADF a -
WALL STREET JOURNAL
~ KGB Official Says He Didn't Defect
Accuses U.S. Agents of Kidnapping Him
WASHINGTON - Vitaly Yurchenko,
prized by the U.S. as one of the highest-
ranking KGB officials ever to defect, de-
nied that he had defected and insisted he
had been kidnapped by U.S. agents.
He said he would return to the Soviet
Union.
Mr. Yurchenko, who reportedly gave
the Central Intelligence Agency valuable
new information on KGB spy operations
throughout the world, was the star of an
unprecedented press conference at the So-
viet Embassy here yesterday. Contending
that he had escaped from the CIA, he said
he didn't remember giving the CIA any se-
cret information.
Mr. Yurchenko said he was seized and
drugged by "some unknown persons"
while visiting Rome in August and was
taken to the U.S. unconscious. He told a
hastily assembled pool of U.S. and Soviet
reporters that for three months he was in-
terrogated and tortured at a CIA facility
near Fredricksburg, Va.
Likely Embarrassment to U.S.
The Yurchenko incident is likely to be a
major embarrassment to the U.S.. just a
few weeks before the summit between
President Reagan and Soviet President
Mikhail Gorbachev. Mr. Yurchenko's ap-
parent defection to the West in August was
viewed as a big embarrassment to the So-
viets.
U.S. officials, shocked by Mr. Yur-
chenko's sudden appearance on television
last night, scrambled to rebut his accusa-
tions, asserting that he came to the U.S.
voluntarily and that he had disappeared
while supposedly going to dinner Satur-
day.
The State Department suggested that
Mr. Yurchenko somehow may have been
captured and coerced by Soviet agents.
John Whitehead, acting secretary of state,
warned Soviet embassy officials that "be-
fore we allow Yurchenko to leave this
country, we will insist on a meeting with
him in an environment free of Soviet coer-
cion to satisfy ourselves about his real in-
tentions."
It was the third time in one week that
an apparent Russian defector had returned
to Soviet custody. Mr. Yurchenko's an-
nouncement came on the heels of the re-
turn of a Soviet seaman who jumped ship
in Louisiana and the return of a Soviet
enlisted man who had sought sanctuary in
the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
'My Torturers'
The Soviets staged Mr. Yurchenko's
mysterious reappearance for maximum
propaganda effect. Appearing excited and
eager to tell his story. Mr. Yurchenko re-
peatedly said his human rights had been
violated at the hands of people he de-
scribed as "my torturers."
Sen. David Durenberger (R., Minn.),
chairman of the Seuate Se IM Committee
on Intelligence, said CIA Director William
J. Casey told him that Mr. Yurchenko
hadn't shown up for a scheduled dinner
Saturday night with CIA agents. Sometime
after that, Mr. Yurchenko called the CIA
and told agency officials that they would
see him next on television.
Both Sen. Durenberger and the vice
chairman of the committee, Sen. Patrick
Leahy (D., Vt.), said Mr. Yurchenko may
have been fooling the U.S. all along as a
double agent. "We got some good stuff,"
Mr. Durenberger said, "but if in fact it
turned out he was a double defector, you
have egg on your face."
Mr. Yurchenko said that at one point in
his interrogation he was brought to CIA
headquarters at Langley, Va., for a dinner
with Mr. Casey, but added that he didn't
remember much about it because he had
been drugged beforehand. He said that last
week he was brought to a Washington su-
burb after refusing to sign a CIA contract
offering him a $1 million "down payment"
and $180.000 annual salary for life for coop-
erating with the U.S.
"I'm very proud I managed to es-
cape ... but I don't tell the details," Mr.
Yurchenko said.
The State Department said Mr. Yur-
chenko was deputy chief of the North
American department of the KGB's first
chief directorate, a position that made him
responsible for directing Soviet intelligence
operations in the U.S. and Canada. Pre-
viously he had served as top security offi-
cer here in the Soviet Embassy from 1975
to 1980.
U.S. officials said Mr. Yurchenko re-
vealed a wealth of Soviet spy information,
including information on two cases that the
CIA made public. One of them involved the
alleged spying of a former CIA trainee,
Edward Howard, whom Mr. Yurchenko re-
portedly identified as having given the So-
viets sensitive information about U.S. oper-
atives in the Soviet Union. Mr. Howard
mysteriously left his home in New Mexico
last month shortly before FBI agents, act-
ing on information from Mr. Yurchenko.
came to arrest him.
Late last month, the CIA disclosed that
Mr. Yurchenko also had provided an an-
swer to the disappearance of Nicholas G.
Shadrin, a U.S. double agent who was last
seen Dec. 20, 1975, preparing for a meeting
with KGB agents in Vienna. In the Yur-
chenko version of the story leaked to the
press by the CIA, Mr. Shadrin was given a
fatal overdose of chloroform while KGB
agents attempted to smuggle him out of
Austria. Mr. Yurchenko yesterday accused
the CIA of making the story up.
The State Department called Mr. Yur-
chenko's accusations "completely false
and without any foundation." The depart-
ment said the Soviet had defected "of his
own volition to the American embassy in
Rome" and had signed a note Aug. 1 re-
questing asylum in the U.S.
The State Department said. "Since his
arrival in the U.S. on Aug. 2. Mr. Yur-
chenko has willingly cooperated with both
the Central Intelligence Agency and the
FBI in providing information about Soviet
intelligence activities throughout the world
and the organization of the KGB. At no
time was Mr. Yurchenko held or coerced
by improper, illegal, or unethical
means."
Approved For Release 2010/08/24: CIA-RDP90-00552R000606040012-4
 Approved For Release 2010/08/24: CIA-RDP90-00552R000606040012-4
glee at revealing its exact location and de-
tails. Only on Nov. 2, when his CIA "tor-
turers" let down their guard, so he said,
was he able to escape.
Yurchenko described how CIA offi-
cials tried to buy his cooperation by offer-
ing him a $1 million payment plus
$62,500 a year for life. The agency, he
said, was even willing to throw in the safe
house's furniture, worth about $48,000.
He met with Casey over dinner at the
CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters, but
claimed he did not recall the conversation
very well because he had been drugged
before the meal by agents eager to make
Casey think he was a willing defector.
Yurchenko denied he had willingly
given any Soviet secrets to the CIA, but
added that he did not know what he had
said while drugged. "Please ask CIA offi-
cials what kind of secret information I
gave them," Yurchenko said in English.
"It would be very interesting for me
to know too, because I don't know."
When questioned about whether he was
in the KGB, Yurchenko said that "I'm not
going to make any comments about spy-
ing business."
T hough Yurchenko gave a confident
performance, many of his answers
were vague or contradictory. He re-
fused to explain how he had escaped from
the CIA. He said he had been held in isola-
tion, but when one reporter identified
himself. Yurchenko mentioned he had re-
ceived a letter from him during his alleged
captivity. Prompted by questions from
two Soviet correspondents, Yurchenko
compared his kidnaping to "state-spon-
sored terrorism" and accused the U.S. of
"hypocrisy" for preaching about human
rights yet violating his. As farfetched as
his tale was, it provides the Soviets with a
handy riposte at home and abroad to un-
dercut Reagan when he brings up Soviet
human rights violations at the Geneva
summit. "What lawlessness!" commented
Pravda after running Yurchenko's ac-
count. "And it takes place in a country
whose leaders trumpet all over the world
about 'democracy' and 'liberties,' who
seek to teach everybody how one should
observe human rights."
Washington officials, agog over what
they had just seen on their TV sets, imme-
diately denied Yurchenko's allegations.
,7.
The Last Wave: Yurdnnko bids farewell as he boards an Aeroflot jet at Dulles Airport
State Department Spokesman Charles
Redman called the charges "completely
false and without any foundation." State
Department officials informed the Soviets
they would not allow Yurchenko to leave
the U.S. until he had satisfied them he
was going voluntarily. On Tuesday eve-
ning he was driven to the State Depart-
ment for a meeting with senior officials
and a psychiatrist. After the 30-minute
visit, U.S. officials concluded that Yur-
chenko indeed wished to leave. As he
emerged from the building, he clasped his
hands above his head and shouted to re-
porters, "Yes, home!"
According to his CIA biography, re-
leased at the end of last week, Yur-
chenko, 49, is indeed a master spy. He
served as a submarine navigation officer
for a year before joining the KGB in 1960.
After several assignments in naval coun-
terintelligence and security, he became in
1972 deputy chief of the third department
of the KGB's Third Chief Directorate, a
daunting mouthful that essentially meant
Yurchenko helped recruit and run for-
eign agents. Ytrchenko came to Wash-
ington in 1975, charged with overseeing
security arrangements for the embassy.
In 1980 Yurchenko returned to Moscow.
where he became head of the section re-
sponsible for, among other things, ferret-
ing out double agents and leaks within
the KGB. In April of this year Yurchenko
was named deputy chief of intelligence
operations in the U.S. and Canada, a po-
sition that theoretically would allow him
to know the identity of every Soviet agent
in those countries. Reports that Yur-
chenko was the No. 5 man in the KGB are
overblown, according to an intelligence
source, but he "was a very senior person
who had a high-ranking position within
the organization."
In late July Yurchenko arrived in
Rome from Moscow and was driven to
Villa Abamelek, the Soviet embassy com-
pound on the city's outskirts. On the
morning of July 28, according to original
accounts, Yurchenko told his guards he
wanted to go by himself to the Vatican
museums, less than a mile away. He never
returned. Though stories have circulated
about how Yurchenko disappeared, in-
cluding an account carried this month by
Actuel, a French magazine, which claims
ikotinued
Approved For Release 2010/08/24: CIA-RDP90-00552R000606040012-4
 Approved For Release 2010/08/24: CIA-RDP90-00552R000606040012-4
that Yurchenko met his CIA contact in the
Sistine Chapel, U.S. officials refuse to re-
veal details. The State Department, how-
ever, reiterated last week that Yurchenko
requested political asylum at the U.S. em-
bassy on Aug. 1.
Yurchenko's defection was-not pub-
licly acknowledged by Administration of-
ficials until late September. Privately,
U.S. officials credited him with supplying
-information about the "spy dust" that So-
viet secret police supposedly used to track
Americans in Moscow. Yurchenko blew
the whistle on Edward Lee Howard, the
former CIA trainee who allegedly gave
Moscow information about a U.S. agent
ing sides long ago. During his Washington
stay in the late 1970s, according to one
high-level source. Yurchenko became
friendly with the FBI agents whom he
met in his job and began trading tidbits
of information.
Yet depression is the constant enemy
of any defector, and Soviets seem espe-
cially prone to what intelligence experts
call "the postpartum blues." Yurchenko's
case reminded many diplomats of Soviet
Journalist Oleg Bitov, who returned to
Moscow last year after defecting to Great
Britain in 1983. Though Bitov offered a
kidnap tale similar to Yurchenko's, Brit-
ish officials are convinced that both men
supposedly had wanted the news of his
defection kept secret, and was quite upset
that the stories about Howard and Sha-
drin had been leaked to the press.
Some in Washington feel that Yur-
chenko was a KGB plant all along, that his
defection in Rome was just a ruse. They
say it is nonsense to believe that he was a
real defector who decided to go back and
face likely death because of a change of
heart. Given his apparent access to the
names and details of KGB agents in the
U.S. and other nations, a former senior
CIA counterintelligence official argues, a
flood of arrests and expulsions would
have followed his debriefings if his defec-
"Suddenly, intuitively, the awful realization hit CIA agent Bum worthy-his dinner companion,
the Russian defector, would not be coming back!"
in the Soviet Union. Howard, who had
been fired by the agency in 1983, van-
ished two months ago in Santa Fe while
under FBI surveillance: he is now believed
to be in Moscow.* The CIA also leaked
word that Yurchenko had solved the
mystery of Nicholas Shadrin, a defector
who, while working for the CIA, disap-
peared in Vienna in 1975. Yurchenko
said that Shadrin had been kidnaped and
killed by KGB agents.
The prevailing view within the CIA is
that Yurchenko was a genuine defector
who grew homesick. The CIA paints Yur-
chenko at the time of his defection as an
unhappy man, disenchanted with the
KGB. fed up with his wife of nearly 30
years and teenage son, and eager for a
fresh start in the West. Indeed, Yur-
chenko may have contemplated switch-
TIME learned last week that Howard eluded the FBI
with a crude ruse. One day Howard and his wife got
into their car and drove off. At some point during
the journey. his wife inflated a balloon dummy and
placed it in her husband's seat while Howard slipped
away. Howard's wife is now cooperating with the
Government.
simply had a change of heart. "A feeling
arises that ... 'Mother Russia beckons.'
that the West, nice as it has been, is not
'me,' " explains a British intelligence
officer.
Yurchenko also was the victim of a
romance gone sour. According to intelli-
gence experts, Yurchenko was deeply in
love with the wife of a Soviet diplomat
whom he had met while posted in Wash-
ington. After Yurchenko defected, the
CIA arranged for him to visit the woman
in Ottawa, where her husband is now as-
signed. Exactly what happened is not
known, but in the end she rejected him.
(In what appears to be only an eerie coin-
cidence. the wife of a Soviet trade official
committed suicide in Toronto last week
by jumping from her 27th-floor apart-
ment. Canadian and U.S. authorities
claimed that the dead woman was not
Yurchenko's lover.)
After the woman spurned Yurchenko.
he became morose. He had trouble sleep-
ing. A bit of a hypochondriac, Yurchenko
insisted on drinking only boiled water. He
tion were legitimate. Instead, the skeptics
point out. Yurchenko offered only meager
pickings, a contention that Reagan
seemed to support last week when he told
reporters that Yurchenko had not provid-
ed "anything new or sensational."
Those who believe his defection was
real counter by saying that Yurchenko
may have been holding back information
for his own reasons, parceling it out care-
fully as he watched how the CIA treated
him. The official CIA line is that Yur-
chenko was in fact quite forthcoming and
supplied details about the KGB network in
the U.S. and abroad. As for Reagan's
downplaying of Yurchenko's revelations,
some espionage experts contend that it is
the only sensible response for a President
who wants to keep Moscow guessing how
much the U.S. now knows about Soviet
operations.
It is difficult to believe that the Soviets
would risk using a KGB official as impor-
tant as Yurchenko in a sting operation
against the CIA. There is always the
chance that the agent might defect for
Continued
Approved For Release 2010/08/24: CIA-RDP90-00552R000606040012-4
3
 Approved For Release 2010/08/24: CIA-RDP90-00552R000606040012-4
good or be forced to reveal valuable infor-
mation. "If you were chief of the KGB,
would you pick an agent who knew all
your agents and send him on a mission
like this?" asks former CIA Director Rich-
ard Helms.
Even many who support the CIA's
contention that it was not hoodwinked by
a fake question the agency's treatment of
Yurchenko. Though the CIA in the past
has kept defectors virtually imprisoned
(KGB Officer Yuri Nosenko, who defected
in 1964, was held in a tiny prison cell for
nearly four years while U.S. intelligence
officials bickered over whether he was a
Soviet plant), the policy today is to give
them as much freedom as possible in or-
der to reinforce their belief in the Ameri-
can system. Yet sometimes that approach
is sloppily executed. Yurchenko, for ex-
ample, allegedly was left pretty much
alone on weekends, with only one junior
officer as his companion. How Yur-
chenko, already feeling depressed, could
be allowed to eat at a restaurant within
walking distance of the Soviet residential
compound also mystified CIA critics. "The
mishandling is obvious," says Republican
Senator Frank Murkowski. "If you catch
a fish this big ... you usually check your
nets to see if there are holes in them."
Many CIA officials agree that Yur-
chenko's handlers failed to establish a
strong bond with their client. Though few
believe Yurchenko took away any U.S. se-
crets other than a firsthand account of
how the CIA conducts debriefings, the epi-
sode is still deeply embarrassing to Casey,
who acted as the defector's top case offi-
cer and wrote personal memos about him
to Reagan. Though the CIA plans to com-
plete an internal inquiry about what went
wrong in about six weeks. there are no
White House plans for a separate investi-
gation. Casey, however, is certain to face
tough grilling on the Hill, where the Sen-
ate Intelligence Committee plans to hold
hearings.
Many are resigned to never knowing
the whole story behind Yurchenko and
how much he helped-or hurt-U.S. in-
telligence. As Republican Senator Wil-
liam Cohen put it last week, pondering
the world of espionage is akin to stepping
"into an infinite line of mirrors where it's
impossible to detect reality from reflec-
tion." The world may never even learn
the ultimate fate of Yurchenko, who is
now probably undergoing another heavy
bout of debriefing, this time, of course, by
the KGB. "Yurchenko will go home to a
hero's welcome. be put on the lecture cir-
cuit there, and then, when nobody's look-
ing, be shot-if he's lucky," predicts a sen-
ior official of the U.S. intelligence
community. That scenario assumes, of
course, that Yurchenko is what he ap-
pears to be: a onetime defector who
changed his mind. Yet sometimes, even in
the land of mirrors, the most obvious im-
age is the real one. -BylamssKelh.
Reported by David Halevy and Pregory IL
W/erzynskl/Washlngton
y
Approved For Release 2010/08/24: CIA-RDP90-00552R000606040012-4