THE SHADRIN CASE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000606040009-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 24, 2010
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: February 27, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
06040009-8
PROGRAM 20/20 STATION WJLA-TV
ABC Network
DATE February 27, 1986 10:00 P.M. aTY Washington, D.C.
BARBARA WALTERS: We begin tonight with a spy mystery
involving a double agent caught in a bind. You'll see how the
cold war is really being fought and how the intelligence
community really operates.
HUGH DOWNS: You know, you mentioned cold war, and we
tend to think of it as a war of words, of propaganda, the kind
of stuff that we're hearing now out of Moscow, with the Communist
Party's Congress going on. But tonight Tom Jarriel is going to
take us to the front lines of the cold war, where real spies risk
their lives.
TOM JARRIEL: It began as a love story. Dashing Soviet
Navy captain falls in love with dark-eyed Polish girl. And they
flee by open boat across the stormy Baltic Sea to sanctuary in
the West.
And it ended on an equally dramatic note, as a spy
story, on the cold dark streets of Vienna in December in 1975, as
the Soviet-defector-turned-American-double-agent disappeared into
the night without a trace.
EWA SHADRIN: With each passing minute, I felt worse and
worse. And by one o'clock I just knew something, something bad
happened, terrible happened.
JARRIEL: Vienna, a magnificent city. Also a snake pit
of international espionage. Here, a man vanished, opening one of
the most complex and cold-blooded chapters in the history of
American intelligence-gathering. Unexplained for ten years to
his wife, to his friends, to anyone.
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What happened to Nick Shadrin? Was he the victim of a
bureaucratic foul-up or of an intentional setup?
Nick Shadrin was Nikolai Artemanov (?), the boy wonder
of the Soviet Navy and its youngest destroyer captain. He
defected back in 1959 with Ewa Gora, a Polish dental student.
CAPTAIN THOMAS DWYER: He was the first Soviet naval
officer defector we had had since, I think, World War II.
JARRIEL: Navy Captain Thomas Dwyer was assigned to
debrief Artemanov, a debriefing that quickly turned into a deep
and abiding friendship.
CAPTAIN DWYER: He gave us some insight into Soviet
naval operations, Soviet strategic thought that we had never had
before.
JARRIEL: Artemanov went to work for the Office of Naval
Intelligence. He became our eyes inside the Soviet Navy. He
warned us not to abandon our surface-to-surface missile program,
which we were about to do. And at a crucial point in the Cuban
Missile Crisis, Artemanov told the Kennedy Administration
categorically that the Soviet Navy could not reach, serve, or
defend Cuba.
In 1960 a disguised Nikolai Artemanov issued a dire
warning to the U.S. Congress that Russia was capable of a first
nuclear strike.
NIKOLAI ARTEMANOV: I believe that Soviet dictatorship
would undertake a surprise attack if they felt that she could win
in one stroke.
JARRIEL: The Russians reacted with furor. They
convicted him in absentia on charges of treason. His sentence
was death.
Nick and Ewa were married shortly afterward, changed
their name to Shadrin, and by a special act of Congress became
American citizens.
Life went well of the Shadrins during those early years.
Nick was using his naval expertise at work, and in his spare time
earned a master's degree and a doctorate. Ewa set up a dental
practice. And the Shadrins immersed themselves in Washington's
social life, mixing easily with military and government elite.
Among Shadrin's early friends was Robert Kupperman, then
a White House national security adviser, now Director of
Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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ROBERT KUPPERMAN: Nick was just a buoyant human being,
full of life, charismatic, with an exquisite incisive mind.
CAPTAIN DWYER: He was a big bear of a man and he'd
greet you with a hug that would almost crush your bones. And he
had a heart that just went out to people. There was nothing that
you felt he wouldn't do for his friends.
JARRIEL: But eventually any defector's information
becomes outdated, obsolete. In Shadrin's case, the brilliant
mind, the boundless energy, the massive ego had less and less of
an outlet. By 1965 his naval intelligence contract ended. And
after six degrading months of job hunting, Nick Shadrin found
himself dead-ended in a low-level analyst job at the Defense
Intelligence Agency.
Within months, at this moment of vulnerability, he was
approached with what appeared to be a way out. After heavy
pressure and without even being paid for his services, Nick
Shadrin became secretly embroiled in one of the murkiest
operations in the annals of espionage.
It seems that back in mid-1966 a young KGB agent known
as Igor called the home of then-CIA Director Richard Helms and
offered his services to penetrate the KGB. Igor held out the
promise that he could be the CIA's mole in the top echelons of
the KGB for decades to come. But to do that, he would have to
enhance his own value to the KGB by recruiting as a double agent
for his Soviet masters the one man they really wanted, Nick
Shadrin.
And get him they did, through a plan devised by U.S.
intelligence. Domestically, it was an FBI-run operation, with
the CIA supplying doctored military intelligence reports for
Soviet consumption. It was a life of cryptic phone calls and
dead drops, as detailed here, carried off with such skill that
neither his wife nor his closest friends suspected it.
But it was hazy from the outset because the CIA
suspected all along that Igor was just a KGB plant. A high-risk
intelligence fishing expedition was mounted by the FBI, using
Nick Shadrin as bait.
The CIA Director in the mid-Seventies was William Colby.
Was the game of getting Igor to work with us worth the
risk of losing Shadrin?
WILLIAM COLBY: Oh, after the fact, it's easy to say no.
But you can't run intelligence operations without risks. And the
people engaged in intelligence operations are well aware that
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they're engaged in risky business.
JARRIEL: Why would a man with his background, his
savvy, why would he get involved in the dangerous game of
espionage?
KUPPERMAN: This is a man who experienced and exuded an
intense sense of loyalty to this country and a great need to
help. And I think that even though the assignments were
dangerous, ultimately Nick, I think, took them just out of
devotion to this country.
CAPTAIN DWYER: I say that Nick's only weakness was that
he had no fear. He just felt that he was in command of every
situation that he found himself in. He was a great hunter, and
he always saw himself as the hunter, not the hunted. He just was
fearless.
JARRIE: So fearless, in fact, that two vacations abroad
with his wife involved meetings with Soviet agents. The FBI
first sent him to Montreal to meet with KGB operatives in 1971.
The second trip came the following year. Incredibly, to
Vienna. Just an hour's drive from Czechoslovakia and Hungary,
Vienna is hardly a safe haven for a Soviet defector under a death
sentence.
20/20 has learned that not only did Shadrin meet with
KGB agents here, he even agreed to an overnight session inside
Czechoslovakia for special training in electronics, a feat he
carried off without a hitch.
The Shadrins returned to Washington. Igor reportedly
vanished. And three more years of growing professional
exasperation for Shadrin went by. The captain was losing control
of his ship.
CAPTAIN DWYER: And I said one day, after we'd had a
couple of glasses of vodka, "Nick, if you had it to do all over
again, would you?"
And he just looked at me and he said [gestures], and
that was all he said.
JARRIEL: Finally, in mid-December 1975, another
rendezvous was set up in Vienna under the guise of a vacation.
It appeared that the elusive Igor was about to resurface.
On December 17th, 1975, Ewa and Nick Shadrin checked
into Vienna's elegant Bristol Hotel. Ten years, almost to the
day, afterward, we returned there with Ewa Shadrin as she
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recalled the bittersweet memories of that holiday season.
MRS. SHADRIN: I remember it looked like really
Christmas was coming. It was cold. There was a lot of music.
The stores looked beautiful, the whole shopping area. It was
very, very festive. People were going with packages under their
arms. It was really, really Christmas mood in Vienna.
JARRIEL: On the night of December 18th, 1975, Nick
Shadrin met with two Soviet agents here on the steps of Vienna's
magnificent Votive Church, one of whom, he told his wife, was the
same Russian he had met with on earlier trips to Montreal and
Vienna. He gave their names as Oleg Kosalov and Mikhail
Kuriashev.
The meeting that night went well. They dined together.
And a second meeting with the same two KGB agents was set up for
this same location for two nights later.
Back at the Bristol Hotel, Ewa waited for Nick with
Nick's CIA handler, a woman who used the name Ann Martin. A
high-spirited Nick Shadrin returned.
MRS. SHADRIN: The way he acted around us, he was so
happy and telling us the story. He just sounded so happy.
JARRIEL: So he felt things were moving along well just
two days before he disappeared.
JARRIEL: Ann Martin then took Nick Shadrin into the
bathroom, apparently for a private debriefing about the meeting.
They turned on the water faucet just in case the room was bugged.
The following evening the Shadrins went to the opera,
across from the hotel; and unexplainably, Nick grew anxious.
MRS. SHADRIN: I could tell that he really didn't enjoy
very much, that he was becoming tense. I just assumed that is
because he had a meeting the following day.
JARRIEL: Nick and Ewa spent the day of the 20th
sightseeing till darkness fell. Later that evening, in their
hotel room, Nick Shadrin kissed his wife of 17 years good-bye.
He said he had another rendezvous with his Russian contacts on
the steps of the Votive Church, and that if he didn't return in
time for a late dinner, she should telephone Ann Martin, his CIA
contact in Vienna.
He walked through the door. It was the last Ewa Shadrin
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MRS. SHADRIN: I started calling the number that he left
with me. It was quite late at night, it was 1:30, and nobody
answered.
JARRIEL: Nobody answered because Nick's CIA handler,
Ann Martin, had first gone to a dinner party and then was
unaccounted for. When Martin finally picked up the receiver at
the CIA safe house, the first thing she said to Ewa Shadrin was,
curiously, "Have you been trying to reach me?"
MRS. SHADRIN: I said, "Nick didn't come back yet. He's
not in the room yet."
And she said, "Oh, don't worry. He'll come later.
Don't worry. Call me the moment he comes back."
JARRIEL: Ewa Shadrin sat up all night in the hotel
room. But by daybreak, still no Nick.
MRS. SHADRIN: I called her five [unintelligible]. I
was asking her, "Why don't you call the man whom he was supposed
to meet?" I mean it was so natural. "Why don't you call and
check if he's at home?"
She said, "We don't know his number."
JARRIEL: The square surrounding the Votive Church is
ringed by buildings with windows, hundreds and hundreds of
windows, any one of which could have been used for surveillance.
Most puzzling of all is that the United States Consulate
had offices in that building, there in silhouette, a block away,
with a view looking directly down here onto the steps of the
Votive Church, where the second meeting between Shadrin and two
KGB agents was to take place. Surveillance simply should not
havae been a problem. And yet, ten years later, the FBI and the
CIA are still quarreling over whose responsibility surveillance
was.
COLBY: It was an FBI case, that I get back to, that CIA
was in a support role with respect to this case.
JARRIEL: Who was responsible for surveillance in
COLBY: Well, the station there. And I don't want to go
into names, but obviously the station there was responsible for
the countersurveillance on it.
JARRIEL: Was anyone in that office looking down to see
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if the meeting took place?
JARRIEL: Can you conceive of a major operation like
this happening and someone not being curious enough to sit up
there and say, "Let's see what happens"?
COLBY: You can say at this point, somebody should have
watched. I don't know the details of the surveillance. It may
have been called off.
JARRIEL: The mystery -- did he get away, or was he
given away? -- deepens as you examine the U.S. reaction.
American officials hear in. Vienna showed no urgency in notifying
Austrian authorities that Shadrin had vanished. 2.0/20 has
learned that the Austrian state police weren't even notified of
Shadrin's disappearance for four days. And it took ten days
before U.S. authorities even filed a routine missing persons
reports. It was done then at the request of the Austrians.
We've also learned that the Austrian Interior Ministry
received a casual telephone call on December 24th from an
American consular official saying a woman who called herself Ewa
Shadrin had phoned the consulate claiming her husband had
vanished and that she was leaving the country for fear of her own
safety. But we've learned Ewa Shadrin had already left Vienna by
then, at CIA insistence, without making any phone calls at all.
Dr. Robert Danzinger is currently Director of the
Austrian State Security Police.
Had the American authorities notified the Austrian
authorities sooner -- in other words, immediately after Shadrin
apparently disappeared on the 20th -- could your authorities
havae conducted perhaps a better investigation?
DR. ROBRET DANZINGER [translated]: In principle, one
can say that the earlier a security officer obtains information
about a case, the greater the chance of clearing up that case.
JARRIEL: And most disturbing of all, 20/20 has learned
that Nick Shadrin's cover in Vienna, that of a tourist, was blown
by U.S. authorities before he ever arrived on December 17th,
because on the 16th a letter had been left for him at the hotel
marked "American Embassy, Consular Section. Dr. Nicholas
Shadrin. Official Business."
In a city where intelligence operatives are everywhere,
Nick Shadrin had arrived in Vienna a marked man, an American
citizen under a Soviet death sentence, sent out alone at night to
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the KGB, an hour from the East Bloc, apparently unprotected.
In your view, was Nicholas Shadrin betrayed?
COLBY: No, I don't think he was betrayed. I think he
was kidnaped. I think the other side wanted him, set up a first
meeting to make sure he was there and would come, then set up a
second meeting. And at that point, it was determined that they
would grab him. And they did.
JARRIEL: As for Ewa Shadrin, first told to go home, now
back in Washington, she was told to keep quiet and wait for more
information.
MRS. SHADRIN: I never got any informations. Everybody
was sort of [unintelligible]. They did only whatever they did
because we were pressing them to do it.
KUPPERMAN: She wanted a meeting with the President.
She wanted a meeting with the CIA Director. She wanted a meeting
with a variety -- just to reassure a human being that the U.S.
Government was trying to do something helpful. She wasn't
getting it.
At very high levels in the White House, I was getting
political warnings about "cool it." But Nick's my friend, and I
just couldn't do that.
CAPTAIN DWYER: It could mean that it was bureaucratic
callousness. it could mean that there was some sort of a trade
arranged, of Nick Shadrin for some future benefit from the other
side. I really -- I do not know for sure.
JARRIEL: If you went out on a mission and you vanished,
would you expect your wife to be treated this way?
COLBY: I went out on a mission and I vanished for about
a week, and nobody told anybody.
JARRIEL: But if you were gone for ten years.
COLBY: Well, maybe. I think I would have been reported
missing, period.
JARRIEL: Over the years, the Soviets stonewalled, as
well. Each time Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin was called to
the White House over the years, his reply was, "Don't ask me that
question. Don't bring it up."
Then, finally, a stunning Soviet counterattack in the
press. The Soviets claimed that Shadrin had never shown up here
at the Votive Church for that second meeting at all. And most
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disconcerting of all, the Soviets claimed the CIA killed Shadrin
after the United States Government learned their prize military
catch wanted to return to his motherland.
The Russians have said, flatly, that the meeting never
took place on the steps of the Votive Church...
COLBY: Well, I don't believe a word the Russians say.
JARRIEL: Well, it sounds like they were watching
things.
COLBY: Well, they may well have. But I would believe
them, what they would say, at all.
JARRIEL: But if they can say the meeting didn't take
place, we can't deny that, can we?
COLBY: We can't deny it, but we don't have to believe
JARRIEL: Finally, on October 27th of last year, almost
ten years after Shadrin vanished, the first official notice. Two
FBI agents appeared at Ewa Shadrin's doorstep.
MRS. SHADRIN: They had sullen faces. And after they
pause, one of them told me that they are coming to bring me bad
news, that Nick is dead, and they know it as a fact beyond any
reasonable doubt.
JARRIEL: High-level CIA sources have told 20/20 that
Soviet defector/redefector Vitaly Yurchenko was the source of new
information on Shadrin's alleged death, a charge Yurchenko
heatedly denied.
VITALY YURCHENKO [translated]: Those newspaper reports
about Shadrin, that he'd been killed, I asked the head of the
CIA's Soviet desk, "Aren't you ashamed of this?" Because I don't
know anything about Shadrin.
JARRIEL: The data he was said to have supplied was
included in a secret cable of protest sent from the U.S. State
Department to Moscow outlining for the first time ever Shadrin's
last hours. He, quote, was abducted by representatives of the
Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, in Vienna.
MRS. SHADRIN: "We have also reliably learned that
during the abduction of Shadrin a chemical substance was force-
fully administered to him, rendering him unconscious. Shadrin was
driven by representatives of the KGB from Vienna toward the
Hungarian border, but died before reaching the border, apparently
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as a direct result of the chemical substance forcefully applied
to render him unconscious."
JARRIEL: When you read the State Department cable, what
went through your mind?
MRS. SHADRIN: I thought that Soviet, if they would get
him through the border alive, he would be tortured, not only
physically, but maybe mentally. And maybe -- maybe it was
better what happened, that he didn't have to suffer.
JARRIEL: What could, what should you have been told
about all this? What did you deserve to know, as his wife?
MRS. SHADRIN: I think I should have been told truth,
and then it would be much easier to go the life.
JARRIEL: What could be so important as to not tell you?
MRS. SHADRIN: They probably have something to hide, why
they decided not to tell the truth.
JARRIEL: What's the moral of the Shadrin story? What
have we learned from this?
KUPPERMAN: I think we learned something about
bureaucracy. We've learned something about cowardice, in my
mind. We learned something about a very shabby way in which when
bureaucracies are threatened, that we treat human beings whom we
have placed in extraordinarily difficult positions. And we've
learned, it seems to me, that politics often reigns over
humanity.
DOWNS: Tom, I don't think I understand exactly why they
didn't tell Mrs. Shadrin. You know, what aspect of security
could be jeopardized by not telling a widow the fate of her
husband?
JARRIEL: The best answer came a few years ago in a
legal praoceeding, Hugh. A federal judge was predisposed to put
out more information about the Shadrin case when he was asked t-o.
The CIA rushed in and showed him the entire file. The judge then
agreed with the CIA that telling more about is case migf7t
indeed compromise ongoing intelligence-gathering operations.
So, even today, this Machiavellian trial (night still be
unfolding.
DOWNS: That proves it's a rough business, isn't it?
JARRIEL: It certainly is.
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DOWNS: I know what they mean by being out in the cold.
Thank you, Tom.
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