VITALY YURCHENKO

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000301930008-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 6, 2010
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: November 4, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
PROGRAM ABC World News Tonight STATION WJLA-TV
ABC Network
DATE November 4, 1985 7:00 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
SUBJECT Vitaly Yurchenko
PETER JENNINGS: There has not been anything like it in
modern espionage. A Soviet KGB agent who we were told had
defected to the United States this summer suddenly appeared
before reporters at the Soviet Embassy in Washington this evening
and said he hadn't defected, he'd been kidnaped; moreover, that
he had now escaped.
And Vitaly Yurchenko was not described originally as an
ordinary KGB agent, but the number five man in the whole KGB.
The American intelligence community is shocked. It is a
major shock to Soviet-American relations, just two weeks before
Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev meet in Geneva.
We begin in Washington with ABC's Jack Smith.
JACK SMITH: Yurchenko's defection to the U.S. this
summer was hailed as the U.S. intelligence coup of all time. But
there he was today, no longer in U.S. hands, but in the Soviet
Embassy at a hastily called news conference, claiming his
defectionto the U.S. had actually been a kidnapping.
TRANSLATOR: I was forcibly abducted in Rome by some
unknown persons. Unconscious, I was brought from Italy to the
USA.
After Yurchenko's statement, reporters were then free to
ask questions.
REPORTER: Mr. Yurchenko, are we to believe that in the
three months that you were in the hands of the American intelli-
gence authorities that you did not in any way provide secret
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information of Soviet intelligence and other activities?
TRANSLATOR: He did not.
In the period in which I was conscious and controlled my
behavior, I'd have not passed any secret information.
SMITH: Yurchenko claimed that his CIA interrogators had
tortured him.
VITALY YURCHENKO: Mr. Charlie, Charlie. His name --
that's his code name, one of his code names, Charlie. But he was
my main torturer. He hate, it seems to me, people of humanity,
because he is, it seems to me, psychologically sick person.
SMITH: Yurchenko recalled a meeting with CIA Director
William Casey, but said he had been drugged.
TRANSLATOR: In certain intervals they were giving me
drugs. And they gave me drugs also several hours before that
meeting with Mr. Casey, but a lesser amount of drugs than was
usual. So I do remember that meeting, but everything seems to
have happened as if in a fog.
SMITH: Yurchenko's version of his defection is severely
at variance with what Washington says really happened. It was
this summer, here at the Vatican Museum in Rome, that Yurchenko
met U.S. agents and agreed to defect. He was a deputy director
of the Soviet KGB and his information was said to be highly
damaging to Moscow. When last heard of, he was reportedly being
debriefed by the CIA and had exposed scores of Soviet secret
operations and spies. It's believed, for instance, Yurchenko
fingered Edward Howard, a former CIA officer who fled his home in
New Mexico two months ago and is still being sought for suspicion
of turning over highly sensitive information about CIA methods to
the Soviets.
Just why Yurchenko decided to go back to Moscow is not
yet clear, but it's believed to have been voluntary. According
to U.S. officials, he simply slipped away from this CIA guards
this weekend and vanished, turning up at the Soviet Embassy
tonight.
JENNINGS: Joining us tonight from Washington is the
Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator
Patrick Leahy.
Senator, are you as shocked as the rest of us, or did
you know all this?
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everybody else. In fact, when I first heard about it I thought
it sounded like something out of a second-rate mystery novel
where somebody got the pages all scrambled up.
JENNINGS: Well, I assume you've been checking. Did we
kidnap him? Did we torture him?
SENATOR LEAHY: No. No, of course not. And it's not
the way that we get defectors. And maybe other countries do, and
perhaps the Soviet Union does, but we do not do that, and did not
do it in this case.
We have one of two things. Either he's trying to make
up a story to get back into the good graces of the people he's
with, or he was a double agent all along. I think I'd find it
awfully hard for somebody who'd been a willing KGB agent to come
over and talk to us at great length and go back and expect to get
the Order of Lenin. He may get the Order of Lubiyanka prison,
but not the Order of Lenin.
JENNINGS: He says he escaped from a safehouse. Do you
SENATOR LEAHY: I think he just -- he came to the United
States voluntarily and he left voluntarily. Whether he walked
away or however, he was able to do it voluntarily. I'm not sure
what motivates him to say what he's doing now. It's obviously
one of two things. Either he wants to ingratiate himself with
people to get back into the Soviet Union. Or, what would be even
worse, he was a double agent all along.
JENNINGS: Senator, there's one story around that he had
a girlfriend in Canada, that he discovered that she loved him as
a KGB agent but not as a defector.
SENATOR LEAHY: Well, I've heard stories, stories like
that. While love might motivate strange things, I think it would
take more than that to motivate what's happened here. Because he
puts himself at enormous personal risk unless it was something
planned by the Soviets all along.
JENNINGS: A major embarrassment to the United States,
though, isn't it?
SENATOR LEAHY: I think it will be played that way.
Certainly the Soviets, having a press conference like this, will
ballyhoo this around the world. And there will be parts of the
world that believe that we really would drug somebody and kidnap
them and hold them all this time.
JENNINGS: And you'll investigate fully?
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SENATOR LEAHY: We will, of course. But so will the
Administration.
JENNINGS: Senator, Senator Leahy, thank you very much
for joining us.
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