A SPY'S STRANGE ODYSSEY LEAVES DOUBT IN WASHINGTON

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Collection: 
Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 
CIA-RDP90-00965R000301850007-1
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RIFPUB
Original Classification: 
K
Document Page Count: 
2
Document Creation Date: 
December 22, 2016
Document Release Date: 
September 25, 2012
Sequence Number: 
7
Case Number: 
Publication Date: 
November 10, 1985
Content Type: 
OPEN SOURCE
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? -.Tin! / Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/09/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000301850007-1 PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER 10 November 1985 ? A spy's strange odyssey leaves doubt in Washington SCENE THREE: Santa Fe, N.M. A By Aaron Epstein" and Carl M. CannoA Inquirer Washington Bureau WASHINGTON ? This is the story of Vitaly Yurchenko, a major or minor KGB agent who came to the United States by means of deceit, defection or drugs. Once here, he spilled important or triv- ial Soviet secrets to the CIA. And finally, on Wednesday, he was flown back to his homeland ? due to lovesiCkness, loneli- ness or simply because his mission was over. As in a carnival hallway of bent and cracked mirrors, the truth is that no one knows what the truth is. Except perhaps Yurchenko himself, who isn't talking and wouldn't be believed if he did. Virtually all that the American public knows about the Yurchenko affair comes from second- and third-hand sources, many of whom are unnamed intelligence sources trained to operate in a shadowy underworld of intrigue and lies. Information about Yurchencho's back- ground, however, became available Fri- day when, in an uncommon move, the CIA issued a three-page biography of him. listing all his spying posts and responsi- bilities. The document gave no indication of where the information was obtained or how it was verified. The CIA document indicated that Yur- chenko would have been in a position to provide a wide array of valuable informa- tion, and said that he had most recently supervised Soviet spying in North Amer- ica and had worked on putting double agents into U.S. intelligence services. But as for the events that led up to his return to the Soviet Union, we are left with the barest plot in the LaCarre man- ner, together with some educated specula- tion about what underlies the skeletal scenario that unfolded as follows: SCENE ONE: It is midsummer 1985. The Vatican Museums in Rome, famed for tapestries, apartments, grottoes, Raphaels, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and Greco-Roman antiquities collected by the popes. Yurchenko, 50, on assignment in Rome and traveling under diplomatic cover, asks Vatican officials for sanctu- ary. On Aug. 1, with the help of Italian authorities, Yurchenko is received as a defector by the US. Embassy. SCENE TWO: Several weeks later. Yur- chenko has been sent to Coventry, which in his case is a magnificent home near a lake in the 500-acre Coventry subdivision about 22 miles west of Fredericksburg, Va., and a few miles from a secret communications base. His CIA guardians are "debriefing" him. Yurchenko fingers former CIA agent Edward Howard, 33, as a Soviet agent, possibly a onetime "mole." moonless night in late September. FBI agents are watching Howard's home. But their quarry slips away and catches a plane, leaving behind his wife, a 2-year-old son and a job with the state legislature. Howard flies to Austria for a rendezvous with the Soviets, according to the FBI. Later, he is spotted in Helsinki, Fin- land. SCENE FOUR: Sometime in Octo- ber. U.S. intelligence sources, none of whom is named, confide to report- ers that Yurchenko was nothing less than a deputy chairman of the KGB, chief of Soviet spy operations, per- haps the most valuable Soviet defec- tor in 50 years. "This guy was a big, big biggie ? and he's left the KGB all ... up," one source says. Exults gleeful British intelligence expert Christopher An- drew: "He is worth about 20,000 se- duced West German secretaries." SCENE FIVE: Nov. 2, 1985. A drizzly Saturday night with a mid-autumn chill in the air. An all-night bistro at the corner of Wisconsin and Dum- barton amid the colonial atmosphere of Washington's Georgetown sector. The name of the place is Au Pied de Cochon. In English, that means pig's foot, a prime appetizer. The decor is Gallic kitsch. The centerpiece is a copper hog mounted on a black me- tallic weathervane. Yurchenko and a CIA officer take a table near the window, where a waiter named Etienne serves them. Between them is a red carnation peering out of a Perrier bottle. Yurchenko: What would you do if I got up and walked out? Would you shoot me? CIA officer: No, of course not. We don't treat defectors that way. Yurchenko (rising): If I'm not back in 15 minutes, don't blame yourself. (He walks out and vanishes into the mist on Wisconsin Avenue.) SCENE SIX: A rain-drenched twi- light two days later. A news confer- ence in the Soviet compound on a hill in upper Georgetown. Yur- chenko, accompanied by grim-faced Soviet officials, tells the reporters that he had been drugged in Rome, abducted to the United States, and imprisoned, grilled and tortured for months, then escaped in a moment of CIA laxity. He says he longs to go home. SCENE SEVEN: Wednesday, Nov. 6. The White House. President Reagan, speaking hours before Yurchenko boards an Aeroflot airliner bound for Moscow, tells reporters: "The in- formation he provided was not any- thing new or sensational. 'It was pretty much information already known to the CIA." ? In Washington, among the politi- cians, the former spooks and people at large, there are two basic theories, each with many variations. Either Yurchenko was a Soviet agent from beginning to end, as- signed to ferret out information about CIA methods and knowledge, spread misleading information, per- haps to embarrass the United States on the eve of a summit conference. Or he was a genuine Soviet defec- tor who, like half that breed, changed his mind, being unable to cope with the emotional strain of being alone in an alien land. Whichever way it was, the consen- sus is that the CIA wound up with a faceful of eggs. "If this guy was legitimate, we han- dled it badly. If he was a plant, we handled it badly," said Sen. William S. Cohen (R., Maine), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intel- ligence. One advocate of the double-agent theory is a former CIA station chief in several of the world's espionage hot spots, who gave this view of Yurchenko. "Most likely, his whole so-called defection was staged and manipulat- ed from the very beginning?The Soviets were ready for his reappear- ance. Saturday night is Sunday morn- ing in Moscow when this guy calls in. How many people are in the ISo- vietl embassy on Saturday night Deady to take action? "It seems to me that before the Soviets considered putting him up before the American press, they had to be sure what he was going to say. That's impossible to do on a Sunday and a Monday" without preparation. "There's a big bureaucratic struc- ture in Moscow. Things have to be coordinated, cleared and improved. ... That's a lot of decisiveness in a hurry.... The speed with which they acted suggests that, at a minimum, they expected this guy to show up on Saturday night." Furthermore, he said, a bona fide defector is under great stress when he leaves his family, property and heritage. The typical defector's later deci- sion to redefect is preceded by a new round of tension and anguish. Usu- ally, he becomes "very critical of his surroundings and the way he is treated. He has a lot of unfulfilled demands," the former intelligence agent said. Continuer! Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/09/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000301850007-1 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/09/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000301850007-1 "But those signs were undetected, or he would not have been taken to dinner.... Normally... U.S. authori- ties deliver la double defectorl to his own officials by prearrangement." Yurchenko's self-assured manner at the Nov. 4 news conference in the Soviet compound was another factor in leading some observers to con- clude that he was a make-believe defector. "I was impressed by the way he talked to the Soviets," a former intel- ligence operative said. "He shushed them. He said what he wanted to say. You don't do that if you're a man facing punishment." But many knowledgeable sources reject that double-agent theory, ad- hering instead to the notion that Yurchenko was a true defector who was mishandled by the CIA, became increasingly homesick and suffered severe depression when his love af- fair with a Soviet woman in Canada soured ? possibly with assistance from his masters at the Kai. Sen. David Durenberger (R., Minn.), chairman of the Senate Intel- ligence Committee, is a leading pro- ponent of that theory. He said, based on his discussions with CIA officials, including director William Casey, that Yurchenko, after furnishing "very valuable" informa- tion to U.S. authorities, went "into a blue funk" for six weeks after his love affair ended, and he decided to bail out. ? According to some sources, Yur- chenko had believed that the woman he loved, the wife of a Soviet diplo- mat in Ottawa, would leave her hus- band and join him in the United States. But she refused, possibly be- cause the Soviets had "gotten to her," Senate Intelligence Committee sources said. The CIA, realizing it had a shaky man on its hands, agreed to escort him to Canada so he could appeal to her in person. Committee sources confirmed that the trip took place, with the assistance of Canadian agents, about seven weeks ago. Again, she refused to go away with him. Abandoned by his beloved, lacking a bond of friendship with anyone around him, Yurchenko had "lost all hope," said Yelena Mitrokhina, who was a worker at the Soviet Embassy here when she defected in 1978. (Incidentally, Yurchenko's girl- friend is not the Russian woman who died in a 27-story fall in Toronto last week, Canadian and U.S. officials said.) Others, however, speculated that the Soviets threatened to harm Yur- chenko's 16-year-old son unless he were to return and accuse the United States of having terrorized him for months. Durenberger and others suggested that the CIA had bungled the Yur- chenko operation at several points. For example, Durenberger said, the CIA had recognized the psychologi- cal warning signs that suggested that Yurchenko was a prime candidate for double defection. But on Nov. 2, his CIA "handlers" were off duty, leaving him in the hands of an inex- perienced man who knew nothing of Yurchenko's depression, the intelli- gence committee chairman said. There is another argument ad- vanced by those who believe Yur- c.hpnko was a real defector. "My sense is that if it was a set-up, he would have waited longer before revealing himself," a former U.S. in- telligence official said. "He came out too soon. He'd want to stay around to learn more about how we function before he went back. "He may have got cold feet because some people on the inside of the CIA began to doubt him and view him as a fake. He may have seen that he wasn't going to be set up for life." ? Now that the Soviet mystery man is back in Moscow ? and, according to unconfirmed reports, the woman he loves was flown there last week, too ? has he come in from the cold or into the deep freeze? Again, the experts split. They ex- pect the Soviets to wring all the pro- paganda value possible out of him. Maybe he'll be promoted, the double agent theorists say. Mitrokhina, who has lived in Washington since her defection, said that if he is a double' defector, "he will not have his job or any job." George Carver, a former U.S. intelli- gence official, predicted a grimmer future. "He'll be taken to Lubyanka," he said, referring to a prison in Mos cow, "and, if he's lucky, a bullet will be put in the base of his skull." In Washington, meanwhile, capi- talism is alive and well. At Au Pied de Cochon, they're serving a new dish: "Moskovski borscht." Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/09/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000301850007-1