The Spy Who Returned to the Cold

He looked rather like a businessman in a hurry, clad in a tan trench coat and bounding up the stairs of the plane. As he neared the top, he turned and gave a wide wave, as if bidding farewell to friends. Though his behavior seemed unexceptional, even banal, that was no ordinary traveler boarding the Aeroflot jet at Dulles Airport last week. He was Vitaly Yurchenko, the Soviet KGB agent who had disappeared from a Rome street one sunny day last summer and turned up several weeks later as a defector in CIA hands. Identified initially as the fifth-highest official in the KGB, Yurchenko was touted as the most important catch in decades and a striking example of how Moscow’s finest have grown disillusioned with the Soviet system. If CIA officials were to be believed, Yurchenko’s defection had jolted the Kremlin.

Yet it was Washington’s turn last week to be stunned. In an astonishing turnaround, Yurchenko, in effect, redefected to Moscow, leaving behind a furor of questions, doubts and recriminations that promise to echo for months. Did Yurchenko simply have a change of heart, one brought about by the dark gremlins haunting a homesick mind, or by despair over being spurned by a Soviet girlfriend living in Canada? Or was he an ingenious fake, his flight to the U.S. and subsequent reversal shrewdly planned by the Soviets to humiliate the Reagan Administration and to glean secrets from debriefing sessions with the CIA? Either way, Yurchenko’s flip-flop deeply embarrassed CIA Director William Casey and his agency. “You’ve either got a defector who was allowed to just walk away under circumstances I can’t accept or you have a double agent planted on the U.S.,” said Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “No matter what, something is wrong.”

The saga of Yurchenko was played out against a backdrop of defection politics that further taxed the Administration. In Afghanistan a Soviet soldier who had sought refuge at the U.S. embassy in Kabul finally left in the company of the Soviet Ambassador last week, but only after the embassy had been ringed by hundreds of Soviet and Afghan troops for five days and its electricity and phone lines cut off. In New Orleans, a dispute continued to simmer over the fate of Miroslav Medvid, the Ukrainian sailor from a Soviet grain freighter who jumped ship twice, only to be returned both times. After Ukrainian-American groups protested that Medvid had been pressured by the Soviets into retracting his request for asylum, Republican Senator Jesse Helms took the extraordinary step of issuing a subpoena for Medvid to appear before a Senate committee (see following story).

The aborted defections prompted Ronald Reagan to suggest that they might be a “maneuver” by the Soviet Union on the eve of the Geneva summit. “Coming as they do together,” he told reporters, “you can’t rule out the possibility that this might have been a deliberate ploy.” But, Reagan candidly admitted, “there is no way we can prove or disprove it.” As for Yurchenko, the President acknowledged that he was genuinely confounded. Said Reagan: “I think it’s awfully easy for any American to be perplexed by anyone who could live in the United States and would prefer to live in Russia.”

All that seemed certain about the drama of the turncoat’s return was that the last act began at a casual bistro in bustling Georgetown, Au Pied de Cochon, where he went for dinner with a junior CIA security officer on Saturday night. As his escort was paying the check, Yurchenko suddenly asked a question. “What would you do if I got up and walked out? Would you shoot me?” Replied the CIA agent: “No, we don’t treat defectors that way.” “I’ll be back in 15 or 20 minutes,” Yurchenko said. Pause. “If I’m not, it will not be your fault.”

He did not come back, and it was not until late Monday afternoon that his whereabouts became public. At 4 p.m., Soviet Embassy Press Counselor Boris Malakhov called the Associated Press’s State Department correspondent to inform him that there would be a press conference in 90 minutes. “We’ll have Vitaly Yurchenko,” he said. Replied Reporter George Gedda: “Wait a minute. Did I miss something? He defected three months ago.” Said Malakhov: “Ah, there have been reports that he defected, but come to the embassy to find out what really happened.”

Across Washington, even the highest officials snapped their heads in disbelief upon hearing the news of the impending press conference. CIA Director Casey, who had not told the White House about Yurchenko’s disappearance over the weekend, quickly called Chief of Staff Donald Regan, who in turn told the President. Reagan apparently showed little emotion, but others in the West Wing gathered in front of televisions to watch CNN’s live broadcast of the conference. What they saw for the next hour was one of the most amazing public performances ever to emerge from the foggy world of spy intrigue.

In front of some 50 journalists gathered in the new bunker-like Soviet compound atop Mount Alto in northwest Washington, Yurchenko vehemently insisted that he had never defected. Occasionally smirking, often scowling, always looking tough and in command, he freely alternated between Russian and English as he spun his tale of being “forcibly abducted” in Rome by American agents, drugged and flown to the U.S. against his will. For “three horrible months” he was held at a safe house in Fredericksburg, Va., Yurchenko claimed, taking apparent glee at revealing its exact location and details. Only on Nov. 2, when his CIA “torturers” let down their guard, so he said, was he able to escape.

Yurchenko described how CIA officials tried to buy his cooperation by offering him a $1 million payment plus $62,500 a year for life. The agency, he said, was even willing to throw in the safe house’s furniture, worth about $48,000. He met with Casey over dinner at the CIA’s Langley, Va., headquarters, but claimed he did not recall the conversation very well because he had been drugged before the meal by agents eager to make Casey think he was a willing defector.

Yurchenko denied he had willingly given any Soviet secrets to the CIA, but added that he did not know what he had said while drugged. “Please ask CIA officials what kind of secret information I gave them,” Yurchenko said in English. “It would be very interesting for me to know too, because I don’t know.” When questioned about whether he was in the KGB, Yurchenko said that “I’m not going to make any comments about spying business.”

Though Yurchenko gave a confident performance, many of his answers were vague or contradictory. He refused to explain how he had escaped from the CIA. He said he had been held in isolation, but when one reporter identified himself, Yurchenko mentioned he had received a letter from him during his alleged captivity. Prompted by questions from two Soviet correspondents, Yurchenko compared his kidnaping to “state-sponsored terrorism” and accused the U.S. of “hypocrisy” for preaching about human rights yet violating his. As farfetched as his tale was, it provides the Soviets with a handy riposte at home and abroad to undercut Reagan when he brings up Soviet human rights violations at the Geneva summit. “What lawlessness!” commented Pravda after running Yurchenko’s account. “And it takes place in a country whose leaders trumpet all over the world about ‘democracy’ and ‘liberties,’ who seek to teach everybody how one should observe human rights.”

Washington officials, agog over what they had just seen on their TV sets, immediately denied Yurchenko’s allegations. State Department Spokesman Charles Redman called the charges “completely false and without any foundation.” State Department officials informed the Soviets they would not allow Yurchenko to leave the U.S. until he had satisfied them he was going voluntarily. On Tuesday evening he was driven to the State Department for a meeting with senior officials and a psychiatrist. After the 30-minute visit, U.S. officials concluded that Yurchenko indeed wished to leave. As he emerged from the building, he clasped his hands above his head and shouted to reporters, “Yes, home!”

According to his CIA biography, released at the end of last week, Yurchenko, 49, is indeed a master spy. He served as a submarine navigation officer for a year before joining the KGB in 1960. After several assignments in naval counterintelligence and security, he became in 1972 deputy chief of the third department of the KGB’s Third Chief Directorate, a daunting mouthful that essentially meant Yurchenko helped recruit and run foreign agents. Yurchenko came to Washington in 1975, charged with overseeing security arrangements for the embassy. In 1980 Yurchenko returned to Moscow, where he became head of the section responsible for, among other things, ferreting out double agents and leaks within the KGB. In April of this year Yurchenko was named deputy chief of intelligence operations in the U.S. and Canada, a position that theoretically would allow him to know the identity of every Soviet agent in those countries. Reports that Yurchenko was the No. 5 man in the KGB are overblown, according to an intelligence source, but he “was a very senior person who had a high-ranking position within the organization.”

In late July Yurchenko arrived in Rome from Moscow and was driven to Villa Abamelek, the Soviet embassy compound on the city’s outskirts. On the morning of July 28, according to original accounts, Yurchenko told his guards he wanted to go by himself to the Vatican museums, less than a mile away. He never returned. Though stories have circulated about how Yurchenko disappeared, including an account carried this month by Actuel, a French magazine, which claims that Yurchenko met his CIA contact in the Sistine Chapel, U.S. officials refuse to reveal details. The State Department, however, reiterated last week that Yurchenko requested political asylum at the U.S. embassy on Aug. 1.

Yurchenko’s defection was not publicly acknowledged by Administration officials until late September. Privately, U.S. officials credited him with supplying information about the “spy dust” that Soviet secret police supposedly used to track Americans in Moscow. Yurchenko blew the whistle on Edward Lee Howard, the former CIA trainee who allegedly gave Moscow information about a U.S. agent in the Soviet Union. Howard, who had been fired by the agency in 1983, vanished two months ago in Santa Fe while under FBI surveillance; he is now believed to be in Moscow.* The CIA also leaked word that Yurchenko had solved the mystery of Nicholas Shadrin, a defector who, while working for the CIA, disappeared in Vienna in 1975. Yurchenko said that Shadrin had been kidnaped and killed by KGB agents.

The prevailing view within the CIA is that Yurchenko was a genuine defector who grew homesick. The CIA paints Yurchenko at the time of his defection as an unhappy man, disenchanted with the KGB, fed up with his wife of nearly 30 years and teenage son, and eager for a fresh start in the West. Indeed, Yurchenko may have contemplated switching sides long ago. During his Washington stay in the late 1970s, according to one high-level source, Yurchenko became friendly with the FBI agents whom he met in his job and began trading tidbits of information.

Yet depression is the constant enemy of any defector, and Soviets seem especially prone to what intelligence experts call “the postpartum blues.” Yurchenko’s case reminded many diplomats of Soviet Journalist Oleg Bitov, who returned to Moscow last year after defecting to Great Britain in 1983. Though Bitov offered a kidnap tale similar to Yurchenko’s, British officials are convinced that both men simply had a change of heart. “A feeling arises that . . . ‘Mother Russia beckons,’ that the West, nice as it has been, is not ‘me,’ ” explains a British intelligence officer.

Yurchenko also was the victim of a romance gone sour. According to intelligence experts, Yurchenko was deeply in love with the wife of a Soviet diplomat whom he had met while posted in Washington. After Yurchenko defected, the CIA arranged for him to visit the woman in Ottawa, where her husband is now assigned. Exactly what happened is not known, but in the end she rejected him. (In what appears to be only an eerie coincidence, the wife of a Soviet trade official committed suicide in Toronto last week by jumping from her 27th-floor apartment. Canadian and U.S. authorities claimed that the dead woman was not Yurchenko’s lover.)

After the woman spurned Yurchenko, he became morose. He had trouble sleeping. A bit of a hypochondriac, Yurchenko insisted on drinking only boiled water. He supposedly had wanted the news of his defection kept secret, and was quite upset that the stories about Howard and Shadrin had been leaked to the press.

Some in Washington feel that Yurchenko was a KGB plant all along, that his defection in Rome was just a ruse. They say it is nonsense to believe that he was a real defector who decided to go back and face likely death because of a change of heart. Given his apparent access to the names and details of KGB agents in the U.S. and other nations, a former senior CIA counterintelligence official argues, a flood of arrests and expulsions would have followed his debriefings if his defection were legitimate. Instead, the skeptics point out, Yurchenko offered only meager pickings, a contention that Reagan seemed to support last week when he told reporters that Yurchenko had not provided “anything new or sensational.”

Those who believe his defection was real counter by saying that Yurchenko may have been holding back information for his own reasons, parceling it out carefully as he watched how the CIA treated him. The official CIA line is that Yurchenko was in fact quite forthcoming and supplied details about the KGB network in the U.S. and abroad. As for Reagan’s downplaying of Yurchenko’s revelations, some espionage experts contend that it is the only sensible response for a President who wants to keep Moscow guessing how much the U.S. now knows about Soviet operations.

It is difficult to believe that the Soviets would risk using a KGB official as important as Yurchenko in a sting operation against the CIA. There is always the chance that the agent might defect for good or be forced to reveal valuable information. “If you were chief of the KGB, would you pick an agent who knew all your agents and send him on a mission like this?” asks former CIA Director Richard Helms.

Even many who support the CIA’s contention that it was not hoodwinked by a fake question the agency’s treatment of Yurchenko. Though the CIA in the past has kept defectors virtually imprisoned (KGB Officer Yuri Nosenko, who defected in 1964, was held in a tiny prison cell for nearly four years while U.S. intelligence officials bickered over whether he was a Soviet plant), the policy today is to give them as much freedom as possible in order to reinforce their belief in the American system. Yet sometimes that approach is sloppily executed. Yurchenko, for example, allegedly was left pretty much alone on weekends, with only one junior officer as his companion. How Yurchenko, already feeling depressed, could be allowed to eat at a restaurant within walking distance of the Soviet residential compound also mystified CIA critics. “The mishandling is obvious,” says Republican Senator Frank Murkowski. “If you catch a fish this big . . . you usually check your nets to see if there are holes in them.”

Many CIA officials agree that Yurchenko’s handlers failed to establish a strong bond with their client. Though few believe Yurchenko took away any U.S. secrets other than a firsthand account of how the CIA conducts debriefings, the episode is still deeply embarrassing to Casey, who acted as the defector’s top case officer and wrote personal memos about him to Reagan. Though the CIA plans to complete an internal inquiry about what went wrong in about six weeks, there are no White House plans for a separate investigation. Casey, however, is certain to face tough grilling on the Hill, where the Senate Intelligence Committee plans to hold hearings.

Many are resigned to never knowing the whole story behind Yurchenko and how much he helped–or hurt–U.S. intelligence. As Republican Senator William Cohen put it last week, pondering the world of espionage is akin to stepping “into an infinite line of mirrors where it’s impossible to detect reality from reflection.” The world may never even learn the ultimate fate of Yurchenko, who is now probably undergoing another heavy bout of debriefing, this time, of course, by the KGB. “Yurchenko will go home to a hero’s welcome, be put on the lecture circuit there, and then, when nobody’s looking, be shot–if he’s lucky,” predicts a senior official of the U.S. intelligence community. That scenario assumes, of course, that Yurchenko is what he appears to be: a onetime defector who changed his mind. Yet sometimes, even in the land of mirrors, the most obvious image is the real one. –By James Kelly. Reported by David Halevy and Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington