THE YURCHENKO DEFECTION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP87-00462R000100160015-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 23, 2010
• Sequence Number: 15
• Publication Date: November 7, 1985
• Content Type: LETTER

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THE DIRECTOR OF
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
National Intelligence Council 13 November 1985
NOTE FOR THE DIRECTOR
FROM: Herbert E. Meyer
Vice Chairman, NIC
You should be aware of this paper;
no doubt it's bouncing around Washington.
Herbert E. Meyer
Attachment:
"The Yurchenko Defection"
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Directors:
Robert Moss
Arnaud de Borchgrave
John Rees
Mid-Atlantic Research Associates, Inc.
THE yURCHENKO DEFECTION
November 7, 1985
Washington's Monday night "by-invitation-only" press conference
of November 4th at the Soviet Embassy during which Vitaly
Yurchenko. a 50-year-old veteran KGB officer, announced his
"escape" from "CIA kidnappers" and his intent to return immediately
to the Soviet Union. seems to have been the climax of what could
have been a damaging KGB operation against the United States
intelligence agencies. It is evident that Yurchenko's main value to
the Soviets at this critical, highly-sensitive pre-summit stage is in
the areas of, propaganda and disinformation. and rebuilding the KGB's
morale damaged by the detection of many of their key NATO penetra-
tion agents and by the defection in London of Oleg Gordievsky. As
EARLY WARNING, the newsletter published by Mid-Atlantic Research
Associates. said in October, "some analysts believe that in order to
raise bruised morale among foreign operatives, the KGB may now
seek to stage another dramatic defection to the East." Certainly
Yurchenko's return to Moscow will serve such a purpose, yet the
known facts in the case also raise questions of what other damage
may have been done.
Careful examination of the events surrounding Yurchenko's defec-
tion and redefection and related activities of the KGB are central to
determining what it has accomplished for the Soviets, whether it was
a KGB operation from the start or whether it was a defection-gone-
sour.
The present propaganda factor is quite obvious. For example, in
an effort to damage CIA Director William Casey's standing, Yurchenko
went out of his way during the press conference, where he appeared
to relish being in the limelight, to interject sarcastic jabs at the CIA
chief about verifying his accuracy of Yerchenko's statements before
he went on to claim to have been taken to the CIA headquarters to
have dinner and a general discussion "of big policy issues regarding
the summit" with Casey.
Yurchenko touched upon a considerable number of Soviet
"disinformation" themes, among them the United States as violator of
human rights, the U.S. as perpetrator of state-sponsored terrorism,
the CIA as a "criminal enterprise." the CIA secretly drugging people,
the CIA in Italy, the papal assassination conspiracy trial of
P.O. Box 1523, Washington, D.C. 20013
1-800-638-2036; in Maryland: 301-366-2531
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Bulgarians and Turks in Rome as a CIA operation, and the Oleg Bitov
redefection from London that took place last year and which has a
number of similarities with his own redefection. In response to
questions from Soviet journalists, Yurchenko answered in Russian,
and in a manner somewhat more propagandistic than his answers in
English for American reporters. Taking into consideration the rarity
with which the Soviet Embassy calls press conferences, the extreme
rarity with which the Soviets give redefectors access to Western
journalists, and the unprecedented step of holding a press con-
ference for a redefector who had not yet left the country whose
intelligence service allegedly had kidnapped. drugged and imprisoned
him. there can be no doubt that the Soviets showed a high degree of
trust in Yurchenko, and that they were using the situation for a
maximum impact domestically and in the West with an eye on the
Summit.
At the start, it must be pointed out that the public accounts of
Yurchenko's defection and subsequent treatment are at varience with
the tried and established procedures well-known to intelligence offi-
cers. According to press reports, Yurchenko was the fifth highest
official in the KGB heirarchy. but actually he was far lower in rank -
by a factor of five or more. News that the Soviet Embassy in Rome
had reported Yurchenko missing on August 2nd to the Italian authori-
ties was in the press within the week. On August 9th, the Milan
Corriere Della Sera reported that Yurchenko had arrived in Rome on
July 24th on an unknown assignment. and had not been formally accre-
dited. On September 1, that paper stated that Yurchenko defected in
Rome on July 28, 1985, after slipping away from his colleagues to
tour the Vatican Museum. This account said he had been on a special
security mission related tb a problem at the Embassy or to the pecu-
liar incident that occurred in Spain in April involving Vladimir
Alexandrov, purported to have been the Soviet Union's chief scien-
tific "nuclear winter expert."
The U.S. media involvement in the Yurchenko defection was nil
except for two articles by Washington-based syndicated columnist
Ralph de Toledano, once a close friend of the late FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover. which evoked little interest until September 25th when
a column by de Toledano was made a front-page story by The
Washington Times. The de Toledano column said that Yurchenko was
the fifth highest official in the KGB, that he defected on July 24th.
that the KGB had made "almost hysterical" inquiries to the Italian
Foreign Ministry which "blandly replied that he is not in its hands....
This has been a tacit admission that they know of his defection. The
logical conclusion is that the CIA has him." The de Toledano article
said that in his head, Yurchenko "carried not only the names of top
and secondary agents but also a rich knowledge of the KGB's modus
operandi in Western Europe. the United States and Latin America.
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The entire Soviet espionage apparatus is therefore in deep jeopardy
and must be rebuilt." The story was picked up by the national media
on September 27th.
President Reagan, however, contradicted the reports that
Yurchenko's information was of the highest value, saying on
November 6th that it "was not anything new or sensational. It was
pretty much information already known to the CIA."
Examination of past Soviet defections shows that Soviet officials,
especially senior intelligence officers, infrequently risk spon-
taneously defecting in a public place to face an entirely uncertain
future and unknown reception. Defectors-to-be usually establish con-
tact with a Western intelligence service first. There is no reason to
think that Yurchenko would do differently; and this raises questions
as to when and how he made contact with the CIA.
Another question is raised by the fact that during the five-year
period (1975-1980) when Yurchenko and his wife, Zhaneta, lived in
Washington, he gave no known indications of having been a potential
defector. Furthermore, while under diplomatic cover as an Embassy
first secretary, Yurchenko was the chief security officer (a position
he acknowledged during the press conference) and the control officer
- a post that is given only to a Communist Party "stalwart" of
unquestioned loyalty and reliability. His job was to monitor the
Soviet community in Washington - including the families - a position
often regarded as more important than the rezid_, the chief KGB
administrative officer. One aspect of embassy security work calls
for maintaining official liaison with host country security and police
forces regarding such matters as protests, demonstrations, threats
and terrorism. Not only did Yurchenko not defect while in the U.S.,
but there has been no indication that he worked for the United States
at any time prior to his defection.
As control officer and a senior counterintelligence officer,
Yurchenko would have been . informed of American intelligence ini-
tiatives against Soviet personnel. some of the activities of the Bloc
services in the U.S.. and of KGB gossip about successes and
failures. He also would have had supervisory responsibilities to
review some KGB operations in order to ensure that American
intelligence had not been successful in penetrating, Soviet operations.
and that American spies recruited by the KGB were not under the
control of U.S. agencies. Therefore Yurchenko could be expected to
have been well versed in CIA and FBI operations, and to have known
the identities of some of the KGB's American sources. Yet,
according to public information. only two or three American fugi-
tive. were exposed. One Is Edward Lee Howard. 34, a
tive. But Howard is described as a small-time ex-CIA agent who was
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pressured Into resigning several years ago. before he made contact
'with the Soviets. Also there is no evidence yet available that
Howard's "volunteering" to the Soviets ever was accepted. It is not
improbable that the identification of Howard was done to establish
Yurchenko's bona fides, and had less intrinsic importance than at
first realized. Yet Howard has been blamed for helping the KGB
identify and arrest a Soviet scientific researcher in a Moscow aero-
nautical institute, A.G. Tolkachev, who disappeared on June 14th
after having supplied what has been termed high quality information
on Soviet military aircraft technology for several years. The
Soviets announced that Tolkachev had been caught in the act of
passing information to Paul Stombaugh, a U.S. Embassy diplomat, who
was expelled. Howard reportedly had been trained to become
Tolkachev's case officer, although he was fired from the CIA before
he ever went to Moscow.
Yurchenko would have been aware of the treatment awaiting
returning defectors, and would have known better than to believe the
promises of Soviet officials, even if he met them after defecting
voluntarily. But there is nothing on the record to indicate that
during the three months that he apparently was cooperating with the
CIA/FBI debriefers, he was contacted by the Soviets or placed under
duress by them to return. Rather, available information indicates
that on one or two occasions he was alone with the opportunity and
means available to contact them. And on Saturday evening. November
2nd, after dining with his sole American companion (contrary to
established practice) in Georgetown's Au Pled de Cochon restaurant,
he slipped away and returned to the Soviet compound. Therefore. it
is a viable supposition that the Yurchenko defection was a pre-
planned Soviet intelligence operation, and that when Vitaly Yurchenko
returned to the Embassy, he was confident that he faced not punish-
ment, but rewards for a job well done. The trust of him exhibited
by the Soviets in the press conference. and the confident attitude
exhibited by Yurchenko supports that view.
But there are other theories surrounding his redefection.
According to some public reports. Yurchenko was allowed to place
one or more telephone calls to his family in Moscow, and that he was
touched by the pleas of his 16-year-old son to return. Another
theory is that he was angered by the treatment he was accorded by
his American debriefers, a joint CIA and FBI group, who, as he
complained at,the press conference, spoke no Russian. did not pro-
vide him with a translator; and required him to speak only in
English.
Other reports say that Yurchenko was suffering severely from
the depression that often strikes defectors; but that his depression
was exacerbated when his alleged former mistress, identified. by ABC
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television as Svetlana Detkova, the wife of an official of Omnitrade,
a Soviet trading company, currently stationed in Totonto, Canada,
refused to defect after the Americans arranged a secret, face-to-
face meeting there between the two in October. After Yurchenko
boarded a Soviet airliner to return to Moscow on November 6th,
ABC's evening news carried a report from Toronto that Detkova had
been killed the previous evening in a fall from the 27th floor of an
apartment building. If indeed she was Yurchenko's former mistress
(the Canadian Foreign Ministry said it had "no reason to believe
there is any relation" between her death and Yurchenko), the cir-
cumstances of her death undoubtedly will provide grist for Soviet
propaganda mills.
Was Yurchenko the most senior KGB officer to have defected, or
was he the most senior intelligence officer to have been used as a
KGB plant? If the latter is the case, it would raise the logical
question of why a senior intelligence official was used, rather than a
younger man specially trained for such a mission? One answer may
lie in England, where the chief KGB officer, the rezident, Oleg
Gordievsky. defected in May. Gordievsky, who served -Previously in
Denmark was said by Danish officials to have been working for the
West for more than a decade.
The Gordievsky defection indeed appears- to have been a most
serious blow against Soviet intelligence operations, and it would
necessitate a major "damage control" operation. But to conduct
damage control, the KGB first would have to determine just what
information Gordievsky had disclosed, how it was being evaluated and
used, and, if possible, to discover whether other Western "moles"
were active inside the KGB and obtain information leading to their
identification. One way to achieve this would be to launch a false
defector. As the Soviets know, information provided by one defector
is used as a stimulus in the questioning of others. It would have
aroused suspicions to send a second detector, one without creden-
tials and with no credible "legend" to the British directly on
Gordievsky's heels. But they could plant him on the Americans
knowing that these countries share some intelligence information of
interest to one another.
The Soviets would not have had time to indoctrinate and specially
train a KGB officer for the role, to supply him with believable cre-
dentials and to create a "legend" for him. But Yurchenko was at
hand - a reliable individual who had been the control officer in
Washington, who was familiar with U.S. intelligence and counterin-
telligence methods, and who had some European service which would
have brought him into areas where his information would be presumed
to complement or overlap that of Gordievsky. Two months intensive
briefing would have been sufficient to prepare him for his launching
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into American hands as a discontented member of the KGB's upper
echelons. Providing collateral for this theory is the report that
some five weeks before his defection, the Soviet press carried a
photograph of Yurchenko with other officials at a June 10th Moscow
function. An evaluation of the "seating order" in this picture indi-
cated to Western analysts that Yurchenko indeed was a high ranking
KGB officer.
Some would challenge this theory, arguing that Yerchenko would
have declined the role as a risk to his career advancement. But
others argue that Yurchenko's intelligence career would not have
been at risk because at the time of his "defection," it already had
proceeded to the customary limit. Moscow reserves the most senior
positions in the Soviet intelligence service for Party nominees from
the nomenklatura - in other words, members of the Party elite who
had not been posted abroad for lengthy periods, if at all, where they
would be subject to outside temptations and influences.
In launching a false defector, obviously there is a risk that the
agent will be detected or "break." However, following the defection
of Anatoli Golitsyn in December 1961, the KGB sought to improve the
compartmentalization of information disseminated inside the Soviet
intelligence bureaucracy. As a result, subsequent KGB defectors of
all ranks have been a little more expert but in much narrower fields.
More significant is the fact that the quality of their general
knowledge of KGB activities not related to their duties - their
"gossip" - has fallen. So while it would have been a severe blow to
the Soviets had Yurchenko "broken," KGB compartmentalization was
designed to minimize the damage. Certainly, in view of the presumed
impact of the Gordievsky defection, it was worth the risk. And
there is the precedent of successful double agent operations in the
past - the individuals known as "Fedora" and "Top Hat" among them.
This is not to suggest that the Soviets would undertake a false
defection operation recklessly. Intelligence operations, especially
Soviet intelligence operations, are relatively cautious. and usually
grounded on precedent. Generally they are not launched unless the
Soviets believe they have sufficient knowledge of the opposing agen-
cy's procedures to be able to predict its moves with accuracy.
What then could have prompted the Soviets to launch Yurchenko,
and what might have been their objectives? Our sources indicate that
within the past several years, the Soviets came to realize that the
Western intelligence agencies had developed an disturbing degree of
knowledge about KGB operations, especially those in Europe. Such
knowledge had to have come from one or more "turned" KGB officers.
For example, the recent publication in Germany and France of detailed
data on Soviet clandestine high technology acquisition operations
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implied that the West had such a redundancy of sources, that it could
afford to risk some of them by publishing in the open press the
material their agents provided. That would have made it imperative
for the KGB's counterintelligence directorate to expose the Western
agents in their midst. At the same time, the KGB would need to
effectively destroy the credibility of the information they were pro-
viding. Both these factors are likely to have been part of
Yurchenko's mission, if he was a plant.
Pursuing the false defector theme another step, KGB officers
know that every defection is quickly followed by a counterintelligence
reexamination of every component of that service connected even
remotely with the defector. The defection of a senior KGB officer
while on a visit in Western Europe would precipitate an even more
severe housecleaning. If the Soviets induced a false defection, it
could also benefit the counterintelligence service by serving as a pro-
vocation under controlled conditions, namely with counterintelligence
personnel already deployed in the field. By this means, the KGB
would be able to observe the initial reactions of their rezidentura
personnel to the impending purge.
This is not to imply that controlled "launchings" of double agents
cannot have adverse side effects. The announcement of the
Gordievsky defection was followed by the hasty flight to East Berlin
of Hans Joachim Tiedge, a top West German counterintelligence offi-
cial who had secretly worked for the East. Tiedge's flight to East
Berlin created a domino effect in which some of the key agents he
had shielded from detection defected in his wake.
A more remote possibility. proposes that if Yurchenko had been a
plant from the start, there might have been a defensive aspect to the
operation by protecting Soviet sources or agents in the U.S. through
denial. Likewise, there could have been an offensive aspect in
determining which Americans were under suspicion as a Soviet con-
tact and why.
Yurchenko is said to have helped his case officers in developing
a psychological profile of the current generation of senior KGB
officers. Some critics strongly insist that the profiles exhibit
"mirror-imagirng" defects - that is, they depict Soviet intelligence
professionals in terms appropriate to or acceptable to Western agen-
cies. For example, in recent months profiles of the KGB's "new
generation" began emerging depicting them as Soviet "yuppies" -
individuals not ideologically motivated, urbane, educated, professional
technocrats who could really savor the good life- in the West and
were markedly susceptible to cooperating with the West, and to
defecting.
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Other analysts of the new' generation in the Soviet Union dispute
that and say that the reality is quite different. The new generation
of KGB officers -in common with their fellows in the military,
science and technology, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
- grew into the benefits and power that the nomenklatura - the upper-
level bureaucracy - has to offer. On the whole, they are pro-
fessionals in pursuit of power which they can get only through the
nomenklatura. The prime goal of the nomenklaturists is self-
preservation and enhancement of their power. The elite Soviet
establishment protects itself -and its loyal members - through a very
cautious process of selection and, promotion that ensures that only
the most reliable and orthodox aspirants will reach the upper eche-
lons of power. In the wake of the damaging defections of two
nomenklaturists - Arkady Shevchenko and Mikhail Voslensky - there
have been efforts to tighten the selection process. This means that
the rising stars of the KGB may not be ardent ideologises, but they
are committed to preservation of the power of the establishment that
created them.
If Vitaly Yurchenko was fulfilling a planned KGB role during the
period of his defection, the available information indicates that he
was an excellent actor. He was considered a friendly and coopera-
tive defector - a "good guy" -by his CIA and FBI case officers, and
in no way was he under "house arrest." He won the confidence of
those conducting his debriefing. He was housed in a Washington
suburb and taken on outings in areas familiar to him from his five
year residence in the capital. On the night of his redefection, he
and his lone American companion, a CIA officer, were dining in a
24-hour Georgetown restaurant, Au Pled de Cochon, which is
something of a hangout for European immigrants in the city.
Yurchenko is said to have selected this restaurant for dinner. It is
located only a few blocks from the Soviet Embassy's new compound.
Before he walked away, he is said to have asked his CIA companion,
"What would you do if I got up and walked out. Would you shoot me?"
When told no, Yurchenko said he was going out and would be back in
15 or 20 minutes. He walked out saying, "If I'm not, it's not your
fault."
But there are many questions remaining. If Yurchenko was a
plant, why did he suddenly bolt for the Embassy? Did he slip and
reveal himself inadvertently to his debriefers? Did they discover
him? Did his debriefers reveal some information to'him so critical to
the Soviet leadership that he had to abort everything to deliver it
when his debriefing would have been expected to continue for at least
a year? Other questions center around the strange treatment of a
KGB defector - his telephone calls to his son, the apparent encoura-
gement of his romance with Mrs. Detkova, his meeting with Director
Casey, his being housed in Washington, his visits to public
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restaurants in the Washington area, the insistence of senior CIA'
officials that he was a bona fide defector, after only a 12-week
period of questioning - cannot be ignored.
It also is relevant to ask about the highly unusual publicity given
to Yurshenko's defection, including a story that appeared in
Newsweek's November 4th edition stating that Yurchenko had met per-
sonally with the CIA Director, to the reporting of his debriefings to
the Senate Intelligence Committee and subsequent media publicity
given to selected disclosures, and the failure of the CIA to inform
the FBI immediately of his disappearance and probable redefection.
Two things are certain: satisfactory answers to the Yurchenko
riddle will be long in coming; and the Soviet Union has developed a
weapon for use at the Summit meetings that may rival the Gary
Powers ploy of the Eisenhower-Khrushchev debacle.
November 7, 1985
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