Vitaliy Yurchenko, the KGB Colonel Who Wasn't Kidnapped by the CIA
KGB Colonel Vitaliy Yurchenko defected to the U.S. in 1985 and redefected to the USSR three months later claiming he’d been drugged and kidnapped by the CIA in Rome.
While he was in the U.S., Yurchenko said the only KGB penetration of the CIA he knew of was by “Robert” (Robert Lee Howard), a former CIA trainee who he said had given Soviet intelligence enough information to enable it, by using some special tracking “spy dust,” to roll up the CIA’s Moscow spy network. He also said he had met with a red-haired former NSA employee (Ronald Pelton) in 1980 when he was working under diplomatic cover at the Soviet embassy in Washington, and that Washington Post reporter Dusko Doder was spying for the Kremlin.
Truth-be-told, Yurchenko had been dispatched to the U.S. to cover for CIA’s “mole,” Aldrich Ames (who had betrayed CIA’s Moscow-based spies), and to suggest that Kremlin-loyal KGB major Aleksei Kulak — J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA “Fedora” who had “volunteered” to spy for the FBI’s NYC field office in early 1962 and returned to Moscow in 1977 — had truly spied for the Bureau.
This is what author Mark Riebling says about Yurchenko in his fine 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA:
What had happened? Was Yurchenko a bona-fide defector who had simply got homesick and cut a deal with his former employers? Had the KGB offered him leniency in exchange for assistance in embarrassing the United States? Or was Yurchenko’s original “defection” to CIA some elaborate ruse? Had he been dispatched to sacrifice the used-up Howard and protect a higher-level mole [Ames]? If so, why would the KGB have put the game at risk by having him re-defect? Officially and publicly, both CIA and FBI claimed Yurchenko had been bona fide, but each blamed the other for causing his redefection. FBI agents told journalists that Yurchenko had gone back because the Agency was mean to him. The Agency countered that it had offered Yurchenko $1 million for his information and then taken him on a two-week vacation, which was hardly treating him as a prisoner. Yurchenko had more likely been upset because he had requested that his defection not be publicized, yet FBI agents repeatedly showed him news clips about it. “That is when he began thinking maybe he’d made a big mistake,” one anonymous CIA official told The New York Times. Privately, an even more serious dispute was raging. In a virtual replay of the [false defector Yuri] Nosenko case, the two agencies disagreed as to whether Yurchenko had been a bona-fide defector. Though the Bureau had absorbed some of [former head of Counterintelligence James] Angleton’s skepticism after Hoover’s death, it was now nudging back toward the old face-value approach. The shift had begun with the retirement of Cregar, gained momentum with the 1983 departure of Nolan, and was sealed by the retirement of O’Malley, on the very day Yurchenko arrived. O’Malley’s successor as FBI intelligence chief, James Geer, was a dedicated golfer who had previously run the Bureau’s forensic crime lab. His sardonic attitude toward Cl was evident in a plaque on his office wall, engraved with a passage from Eric Ambler’s spy thriller Light of Day: “I think if I were asked to single out one specific group of men, one category as being the most suspicious, unbelieving, unreasonable, petty, inhuman, sadistic, double-crossing set of bastards in any language, I would say without hesitation the people who run counterespionage departments.” Geer preferred simple, obvious explanations to unprovable and complex ones, arrests over double-agent games, action over theory. Whereas Nolan had declared the FBI’s old KGB informant “Fedora” bogus, [in 1983] Geer’s team [augmented by two helpers from probable KGB “mole” Leonard V. McCoy’s CIA office] reversed the Bureau to its original position — an assessment seemingly confirmed by Yurchenko’s claim that there had “never been anything but genuine defectors.” To Geer, as to Yurchenko’s FBI handler, [Mike] Rochford, there was no question that Yurchenko was legitimate. It was unthinkable that the KGB would have given over good live leads like Pelton and Howard for any reason, and least of all to establish the bona fides of an agent who would later redefect.
“Bullshit!” the FBI men soon heard their Agency counterparts saying. Ames stood by Yurchenko, but most of his colleagues thought Yurchenko had been a false defector. This determination was reached despite Angleton’s legacy, rather than because of it. Hathaway thought that Angleton’s obsession with moles and false defectors paralyzed the Agency; Thompson had served briefly on Angleton’s Cl Staff and was bored. But neither could believe in Yurchenko. The man himself now said he had been a loyal KGB man all along. Why not believe him? Both of the agents he had exposed, Howard and Pelton, had lost access to U.S. secrets, and therefore would have been perfect “chicken feed.” They were live cases from the FBI’s prosecutorial point of view, but dead to the KGB — just as Nosenko’s leads had been.
There were other parallels with Nosenko. Both defectors claimed that priceless CIA assets in Moscow had been compromised by spy dust, not by Soviet moles. Both made claims about KGB recruitments of U.S. journalists in Moscow which were admitted by the FBI to be without substance (Nosenko had implicated ABC’s Sam Jaffe, Yurchenko the Washington Post's Dusko Doder). Both claimed not to know things they should know, if they really were who they said they were. (Yurchenko, though supposedly running all KGB agents in North America, knew of no illegals, and could report on no approaches made to the Soviets by “dangled” U.S. agents.) Indeed, Yurchenko seemed to follow the Nosenko script so closely that Cl staffers had found themselves referring to records on that earlier case for clues as to what the Soviets might be up to with Yurchenko. Particularly suggestive was a February 1964 memo by then Soviet Division chief David Murphy, suggesting that Nosenko ’s defection was part of “a massive propaganda assault on CIA in which Subject, most probably as a re-defected CIA agent,’ will play a major but not necessarily the sole role.”
But whereas Murphy had once argued for Nosenko ’s incarceration, in part to prevent that prediction from being fulfilled, CIA had decided on the opposite approach, perhaps to see whether Yurchenko would follow the script that Murphy had outlined. Thus had they sent Yurchenko to a restaurant a few blocks from the Soviet Embassy on November 2, with a single unarmed guard, and waited to see what he would do. Yurchenko had then done what Murphy predicted in 1964, right down to the “propaganda assault.”
If it was difficult for the FBI to comprehend why the Soviets would deliberately impugn Yurchenko’s bona fides by engineering his return to the USSR, it was equally difficult for CIA to fathom why, if Yurchenko was a truly disloyal KGB officer, he had not been executed or imprisoned, but was attending parties and had reportedly been promoted. One possibility was that the KGB had not originally planned to reel in Yurchenko, but had done so after learning, perhaps from a CIA mole, that Yurchenko was under suspicion of being bogus. That way, the KGB would at least keep him from cracking under CIA interrogation and could confuse and demoralize American intelligence in the bargain. In any case, with so many questions about Yurchenko, CIA certainly questioned his basic “message,” which seemed to be: No false defectors, no moles — relax, there’s nothing to worry about.
That the United States nevertheless had much to worry about became clear in the weeks after Yurchenko’s redefection. At least four more CIA agents were burned, and a third FBI source in the Washington embassy was hustled back to Moscow and executed. These sources had all been recruited after Howard left CIA, and Hathaway began to doubt whether Howard had been in a position to blow any of the cases that had been going bad. But if Howard hadn’t burned those operations, how had they been compromised? Was there another traitor still roaming the halls at Langley? The possibility that Howard and Yurchenko had been tipped to the suspicions against them certainly suggested as much.