A DEFECTOR'S TALE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403600003-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 12, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: February 21, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ST Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/12 : CIA-RD P90-00965R000403600003-9
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WALL STREET JOURNAL
21 February 1985
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A Defector's Tale
, BY WILLIAM KUCEWICZ
The memoirs of Arkady N. Shevchenko
have made a big media splash. He is billed
as the highest-ranking Soviet official ever
to defect." His tale has been told on the
front page of the New York Times, on
CBS's "60 Minutes" and in Time maga-
zine's lengthy excerpts from his book. To
judge by all the hoopla, it would seem the
West has laid hands on another Alexander
Solzhenitsyn.
Not quite. Mr. Shevchenko doesn't have
the gift of engaging prose, and he was, af-
ter all, only a high-ranking Soviet bureau-
crat, not a Politburo decision maker. He
sometimes seems to exaggerate his own
importance and depth of knowledge. In-
deed, some U.S. intelligence experts ques-
tion a few of Mr. Shevchenko's observa-
tions, especially his knowledge of the inter-
nal workings of the KGB.
Nonetheless, "Breaking With Moscow"
(Knopf, 378 pages, 518.95) is well worth
reading. Mr. Shevchenko did have consi-
derable contact with the Kremlin chief-
tains, especially when he was "personal
adviser" to foreign minister Andrei Gro-
myko in the early 1970s and later as un-
der secretary general of the United Na-
tions. His book contains valuable informa-
tion. One just has to choose carefully.
The book opens with Mr. Shevchenko's
distinctly unsatisfying account of his cou-
rageous decision to defect to the West. For
all his disgust with the "hypocrisy and cor-
ruption" of the Soviet leadership, he says
too little about his final decision to turn se-
cretly against the Kremlin and seek a ha-
ven in the U.S., becoming, for a time, a
"reluctant" spy for the Central Intelli-
gence Agency. He does tell us what it is
like to be an informant. There are secret
meetings at "safe houses," there is micro-
fiLm stuffed into a razor handle and there
is the constant fear of being caught.
In the end Soviet counterintelligence
a aeni 1 discover Mr. evc enTco s -
saw how easily they called vice virtue, and
just as easily reversed the words again.
How their hypocrisy and corruption had
penetrated the smallest aspects of their
lives, how isolated they were from the pop-
ulation they ruled."
Indeed, his best insights are contained
in his account of the 22 years he spent
working for the Soviet foreign ministry,
until his defection in 1978. In East-West
matters, he avers, the Kremlin leadership
has a "double-handed approach." In 1972,
for instance, the Soviet Union signed an in-
ternational treaty abolishing biological
weapons. Yet the Soviet military never
abandoned its biological warfare program.
At the U.N., Mr. Shevchenko was directed
to "assist" what he describes as the "So-
viet-controlled" World Peace Council, a
group that railed against the Pentagon but
ignored the Soviet Union's own massive
military buildup.
Of great importance as we head toward
new arms talks this spring are Mr. Shev-
chenko's comments that suggest that the
Kremlin leadership may view-arms-control
agreements as shams and decoys. Mr.
Shevchenko quotes Leonid Brezhnev as
saying "detente does not in the slightest
abolish, nor can it abolish or alter, the
laws of the class struggle."
Mr. Shevchenko concludes, in his own
words, that "Detente was viewed by the
U.S.S.R. not only as a temporary measure,
but also as a selective policy. The Polit-
buro assumed it to be a tactical maneuver
for a certain period of time that would in
no way supersede the Marxist-Leninist
idea of the final victory of the world-wide
revolutionary process."
Althou
h man
f M
'
g
y o
r. Shevchenko
s ob-
oouele 11fe. After receivlne a va~~o re me before-the genius of Stalin, the infalli.
guest from Soviet authorities that he . - bility and vision of the Party, its justness,
turn to Moscow, he told h' its concern for the fate of the people and
that the time had come for him to def or the country-seemed false."
Face pub a execution. Mr. Shevchenko was only 26 years old
Mr. Shevchenko seems to have had a at the time. But in Stalin's Soviet Union,
realistic view of what he was doing. He that should have been old enough to know
says that he "didn't idolize American soci- of the purges, the prisons, the labor camps
ety"; he knew that many Soviet emigres and the executions.
"had found hard lives and sadness here." In his portrayal of Mr. Gromyko, more-
On the other hand, he says, "I sat at the over, he says that this elderly "political
same table with Brezhnev, Gromyko, and bulldog" will "again try to restore the So-
other members of the Politburo, and I viet-American relations to a normal level,
learned a great deal about the men who even if he must do it 'brick by brick.' "
were the masters of the Soviet Union. I Some seven pages later, however, he re-
servations ring true, others are disturb-
ingly naive or contradictory. He says, for
example, that "Khrushchev's unmasking
of Stalin, in his secret speech at the Twen.
tieth Party Congress in 1956, wounded me
deeply. . . . All that had been sacred for
Bookshelf
"Breaking With Moscow"
By Arkady N. Shevchenko
lates that in July 1972, at the U.N., Mr.
Gromyko "instructed me to concoct a
proposition that would permit us to use nu-
clear weapons against China and at the
same time would not make it look as if we
were abandoning our position on the pro-
hibition of these arms." Mr. Shevchenko
never reconciles that apparent contradic-
tion.
Despite its shortcomings, much can be
learned from Arkady Shevchenko's story
of "Breaking With Moscow." It is a dis-
turbing reminder of the'evils that lurk be-
hind the Kremlin walls.
Mr. Kucewiez is a Journal editorial
page writer.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000403600003-9