SOVIET SPY'S FLIP-FLOP LEAVES CIA RED-FACED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201190003-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 13, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: November 10, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/13: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201190003-9
ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PAGE 1311, J
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
10 November 1985
Soviet spy's flip-flop
leaves CIA red-faced
By Raymond Coffey
Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON--No one hero---
starting with President Reagan-
seems to know for sure whether
Soviet spymaster Vitaly Yurchen-
ko, who flew home to Moscow last
week, was a bona fide defector or
a KGB plant.
But the whole world knows the
Central Intelligence Agency blew
another big case, to the considera-
ble embarrassment of the Reagan
administration as it prepares for
the Geneva summit with Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
And whatever else his future
holds, Yurchenko's career in the
top echelon of the KGB is effec-
tively finished; even if he was a
plant, his Soviet superiors can
never really trust him again.
Those appear to be, following
Yurchenko's stunningly dramatic
redefection announcement last
Monday, the only real consensus
judgments that have emerged
among administration officials,
people on Capitol Hill most famil-
iar with the case and members of'
what is called the "intelligence
community."
The CIA, mainly through its loy-
alist alumni with which
Washington is aswarm, mounted a
major campaign last week to per-
suade Congress, the media and the
public that Yurchenko, who had
been identified as the No. 5 man in
the KGB apparatus and touted as
one of the prize catches ever lan-
ded by the CIA, was a genuine and
valuable defector.
In the last few days some critics
in the administration and Congress
have taken the CIA to task for its
handling of the affair and have
suggested that Yurchenko was not
such a prize catch after all.
Friday night, in an unusual step
apparently intended to rebut those
critics, the CIA made public a
three-page "fact sheet" tracing
Yurchenko's career from high
school in 1948 to his last as-
signment, supervising KGB agents
in the U.S. and Canada. The infor-
mation presumably came from
CIA interrogation of the man.
But doubts persist, especially
among experts in Congress, and
even President Reagan seemed un-
persuaded by the CIA argument.
In an interview with news agen-
cy reporters last week the Presi-
dent gave weight to the theory that
Yurchenko was a plant all along
and that the KGB had hoodwinked
the CIA.
Reagan suggested the Yurchen-
ko case, plus two other recent
incidents involving Soviet defectors
who changed their minds, might
constitute a "deliberate ploy"
aimed at affecting the political
climate at his Nov. 19-20 summit
with Gorbachev.
Reagan also disputed the re-
lentlessly publicized claims of CIA
Director William Casey and his'
operatives that Yurchenko had
supplied the U.S. with extremely
valuable intelligence during his
three months in the care of the
CIA.
"The information that he provid-
ed was not anything new or sensa-
tional," Reagan said, adding that
most of it was already known to
the CIA.
While Yurchenko's motives and
authenticity remained a puzzle,
even some of the CIA's staunchest
friends in official Washington ad-
mitted to chagrin and embar-
rassment over the handling of the
Yurchenko case.
A member of Congress who
serves on one of the intelligence
oversight committees and is gener-
ally an active defender of the CIA
said he wondered whether "they're
a bunch of Keystone Kops" or
"broken-down house dicks."
Sen. David Durenberger [R.,
Minn.), chairman of the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence,
said he believed Yurchenku was a
genuine defector and the CIA had
not been lax in allowing him to get
up from dinner with a CIA agent
and stroll over to the nearby Soviet
Embassy residential compound
last Saturday night.
But Senators Patrick Leahy [D.,
Vt. ], Sam Nunn [ D.. Ga. ] and
William Cohen [R., Me.], who also
serve on the committee and re-
ceived extensive briefings on Yur-
chenko from the time he defected
in Rome last summer, all ex-
pressed suspicions that Yurchenko
was a double agent from the begin-
ning, planted on the CIA by the
KGB.
Either he was a legitimate defec-
tor who created "significant em-
barrassment" to the U.S. by being
allowed to walk away from his CIA
handlers and redefect, Leahy said,
or "you have a double agent who
was planted on the United States
and then you have far more than a
significant embarrassment, you
have an out-and-out calamity."
As in any good spy story, the
Yurchenko case involves almost
countless twists and turns and
speculations. Inevitably also, there
is the romantic angle.
In the early days after he alleg-
edly came in from the cold, Yur-
chenko, 49, who wears a walrus
mustache, was being touted in
CIA-inspired leaks as not only an
extremely high-ranking KGB offi-
cer-the man in charge of all Sovi-
et espionage in the U.S. and Cana-
da-but as a new and different
kind of defector.
He had defected, the stories
went, not for love or money or
selfish interest but for ideological
reasons: He was fed up with com-
munism and the Soviet system.
But after his redefection, the
assiduously spread leaks from the
intelligence community took a dif-
ferent turn and focused instead on
Yurchenko's alleged jilting in a
love affair with the wife of a Soviet
diplomat stationed in Canada.
He had intended, to defect and
have her join him in an affluent
new life in America supported by a
fat CIA payoff. By Yurchenko's
account, the CIA had offered him
$1 million plus $62,500 a year, with
annual Social Security-style cost-
of-living adjustments. They were
also willing to throw in $48,000
worth of furniture from the CIA
"safe house" in Virginia where the
CIA had stashed him, Yurchenko
said.
Now, came the word from CIA
supporters, Yurchenko's motives
weren't ideological at all. Instead,
as one retired CIA official put it,
"the chick chickened out," he got
"cold feet" and changed his mind.
Yurchenko, in fact, did make a
recent trip to Canada, obviously
with the approval of his CIA
handlers, according to reports
from Canada. But Canadian offi-
cials ruled out any link between
Yurchenko and the suicide in
Toronto last week of the 48-year-
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old wife of a Soviet trade represen-
tative.
Those who support the CIA ar-
gument that Yurchenko originally
was a legitimate defector rely
mainly on reports that he identi-
fied for the CIA at least four
sometime operatives in U.S. agen-
cies who were, in fact, Soviet
agents.
The most celebrated case is that
of Edward Lee Howard, a former
CIA employee who allegedly tip-
ped the Soviets off and enabled
them to nail A.G. Tolkachev, a
Soviet aeronautical electronics ex-
pert who had been supplying infor-
mation to the CIA.
Those who question the genuine-
ness of Yurchenko's defection note
that Howard had been fired by the
CIA before Yurchenko defected
and therefore was of no further
value to the Soviets anyway.
Moreover, in another example of
what critics regard as incompe-
tence on the part of the CIA,
Howard vanished from his New
Mexico home before the FBI was
able to arrest him and has now
fled the country. The CIA report-
edly failed to tell the FBI of its
doubts about Howard.
In the Yurchenko redefection,
the CIA apparently did not notify
the FBI or anyone else that he had
disappeared. The White House, the
Justice Department and apparent-
ly the CIA itself were taken totally
by surprise Monday when Yur-
chenko turned up at a rare press
conference in the Soviet Embassy
and claimed he never had defec-
ted-that he had been kidnaped,
drugged and tortured by U.S.
agents.
What has been most baffling to
most people about the CIA hand-
ling of the case is that Yurchenko,
dining with a single CIA handler at
the Au Pied de Cochon restaurant
in the Georgetown section of
Washington last Saturday, was al-
lowed to get up and leave with no
questions asked and no effort
made to trail him.
CIA and other intelligence sourc-
es contend, however, that any de-
fector is free to come and go as he
pleases, and there is no legal basis
for restraining one.
They point out also that the CIA
got in hot water about 20 years ago
because, out of concern that Yuri
Nosenko, another alleged KGB de-
fector, was a plant, the CIA kept
him locked in isolation from 1964 to
1968. The intramural battle over
whether Nosenko was or was not
genuine raged for years and cul-
minated in a still controversial
housecleaning of top officials in the
CIA's counterintelligence section.
The U.S. flatly denied Yurchen-
ko's claims of having been kid-
naped, drugged and mistreated,
and those denials are almost
unanimously accepted here.
A retired top-ranking CIA official
who personally dealt with "hun-
dreds of defectors" said that sort
of treatment is not the way the
agency operates. Taking Yurchen-
ko out to dinner and allowing him
"some elbow room" fits the stand-
ard operating procedure, he said.
But, he acknowledged, "I guess
you'd have to say the security net
was not adequate" in this case.
The principal negative in the
Yurchenko case, the former CIA
official insisted, was that the U.S.
suffered a "significant loss" be-
cause the three months or so Yur-
chenko was in CIA hands was only
enough time to "skim the cream"
off all the intelligence that might
have been pried out of him.
"He's the kind of guy you'd like
to talk with for at least another
year," he said.
Beyond the embarrassment to
the CIA, intelligence sources said
the Soviet Union now can be ex-
pected to make the most of the
propaganda opportunity presented
by the Yurchenko case, especially
in connection with the summit.
Reagan has made it plain he
intends to confront Gorbachev on
the issue of Soviet infringements
on human rights. The Soviets al-
ready are trumpeting around the
world Yurchenko's allegations and
the Soviet media are describing his
alleged treatment as another ex-
ample of U.S. "state terrorism."
The Soviets also will profit from
the Yurchenko case, a former CIA
official said, by using it both to
discourage future defections and to
encourage other defectors to rede-
fect.
"They [the Soviets] were really
hemorrhaging there for a while"
with a large number of important
defections, including the KGB sta-
tion chief in London, the former
CIA official noted.
But now, he said, "they'll be
using Yurchenko as an example:
'See what happens to you when
you deal with these guys?' That's
a pretty powerful deterrent."
The Soviet Union so far is
treating Yurchenko as something
of a hero for his alleged escape
from the CIA. But no one in the
intelligence community here
seems to think that will last for
long.
"Even if he was a plant," the
former CIA official said, "they can
never really trust him again. They
can never be sure that we didn't
'turn' him while we had him.
"They'll keep him around for a
while in case anybody asks
whatever happened to Yurchen.
ko, he said, "but in a year or two
we'll hear he got killed in a car
accident or something."
Despite the criticisms of the CIA
Performance on the case, Director
Casey, 72, apparently will have a
kinder fate.
2.
The Senate Intelligence Commit.
tee is demanding answers on how
it all happened, and a member of
the House committee said Casey
"is a very smart guy, but as
captain of the ship he's got to take
the rap."
A senior White House aide late
last week also made clear that the
President is furious about the em-
barrassment. But Reagan appar-
ently has no intention of calling
Casey, his former campaign man-
ager, on the carpet or taking any
direct action in the case.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/13: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201190003-9