The Strange Cases of Igor Kochnov and Vitaliy Yurchenko . . .
IGOR KOCHNOV
KGB Colonel Igor Kochnov, posted temporarily at the Soviet embassy in Washington, called Deputy Director of CIA (soon to be Director) Richard Helms at home on a Sunday morning in June 1966 and offered to spy for the CIA. CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, James Angleton, believing that Kochnov was a “plant” and fearing that the Soviet division was penetrated by a “mole,” decided to “play” him back against the KGB by having his confidant, mentor and mole-hunting boss, probable KGB “mole” Bruce Solie from the Office of Security, be Kochnov’s CIA case officer but didn’t tell him he thought Kochnov was fake.
Kochnov told Solie and his straight-arrow FBI case officer, Elbert “Bert” Turner, that he’d been sent to the US to try to find and recruit Soviet defector Nicholas Shadrin (original name Artamonov) and kidnap-or-kill both (true-defector) Anatoliy Golitsyn AND (false-defector) Yuri Nosenko . . . and in so doing, revived Nosenko’s flagging fortunes with the CIA. (A few years later he would not only be “cleared” by Solie but hired by the Agency to teach counterintelligence to its new recruits.)
Kochnov said that if Shadrin would pretend to be recruited by him, it would impress his superiors and get him promoted to a higher position and thereby become even more valuable to the CIA. Shadrin, a former Soviet destroyer captain, was talked into going along with the ploy by the Deputy Director of CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner.
Angleton warned Solie and his colleague, probable “mole” Leonard V. McCoy, to not let Shadrin travel abroad, but they did —first to Canada on an ostensible double-agent mission, and then twice to Vienna to meet with Kochnov.
It was in December 1985, during his second trip to the Austrian capital to meet with Kochnov, that Shadrin was either kidnapped and killed by the KGB, or, as some have speculated, smuggled back to the USSR as an agent who was Kremlin-loyal all along.
VITALIY YURCHENKO
This is what former high-level CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley says about Yurchenko in his 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games:
"[Yurchenko was a] high-ranking KGB officer who defected to the United States from Italy in 1985. While being debriefed in Washington — after [certifying false defector Yuri Nosenko as a true defector,] giving information that led to the uncovering of burned-out KGB spies Ronald Pelton and Edward Lee Howard and confirming the importance of John Walker and his son Michael — Yurchenko […] went to the Soviet Embassy and returned to the USSR, where he was [given a medal and] restored to his KGB status. He was still working in the KGB in 2002.”