The Double Defector
“Either Yurchenko is as smart as the devil himself, or he is the luckiest bastard alive.”
By the time August 1985 dawned, American intelligence officers were consumed by the suspicion that a Soviet mole had dug himself into a sensitive position in one of their organisations. Just two months earlier one of their premier assets had been apprehended by the KGB, the most recent among a group of CIA assets compromised in Moscow.
Old US embassy building, Moscow
Adolf Georgievich Tolkachev was one of the Chief Designers at Phazotron Design Bureau, the Soviet entity that developed military radars and avionics systems. Between 1978 and 1985, he had passed on thousands of documents detailing Soviet aircraft and weapons systems capabilities, saving the Americans years of R&D time. He would later come to be known as the Billion Dollar Spy for the value of the product he delivered.
Tolkachev had been arrested by the KGB while driving back to Moscow from his dacha sometime before 13 June 1985, and the Americans were scrambling to figure out who had betrayed him. So when Vitaly Yurchenko, a Colonel of the KGB specialising in counterintelligence, walked into the American embassy in Rome on 1 August and offered them Soviet secrets in return for a new life in the West, he was quickly bundled out of Italy and taken via Andrews Air Force Base to a CIA safe house in Oakton. He demanded anonymity and money in exchange for cooperation with the Americans. He also suspected that he had stomach cancer, and thought he was going to die.
There he was initially debriefed by Aldrich Ames, a CIA analyst, and FBI special agent Michael Rochford. They were joined the next day by Colin Thompson, another CIA analyst who became Yurchenko’s primary CIA handler when Ames moved on to another assignment.
Adolf Tolkachev (L) and Col Vitaly Yurchenko (R)
The initial debriefing focused on validating Yurchenko’s bona fides by asking him questions whose answers the CIA and FBI already knew. He had spent many years posted in the Soviet embassy in Washington DC as a security officer, and the corroboration began from that point. The interviews were taped, transcribed, and circulated within the FBI and CIA, and his answers were corroborated. The defector passed this test.
60 assets and two moles
Then he gave them information about almost 60 KGB assets in America. Some of these were known to the FBI, others were new leads that they assiduously chased. He also provided them with information about a mole. KGB cables, he claimed, had referred to this mole as ‘Mr Robert’. The information he provided led the Americans to suspect Edward Lee Howard. A CIA officer about to be posted to Moscow in 1983 and expected to run the CIA’s star asset in Moscow, Howard had been briefed about Tolkachev. But he failed lie detector tests multiple times and was kicked out before he could be deployed.
Edward Lee Howard
Yurchenko claimed that Howard had travelled to Vienna and met the KGB twice, in September 1984 and April 1985. He said it was during the trip in April that Howard had passed on information leading to the arrest of Tolkachev. The FBI began watching Howard in Santa Fe and his phone was tapped. Howard figured out he was under surveillance, and approached a member of the FBI team, claiming that he was ready to talk in the presence of his lawyer. A meeting was scheduled for the following week, but Howard disappeared the next night, flying to New York and then to Helsinki where he walked into the Soviet embassy. Till his death in 2002 in Russia, Howard maintained his innocence, claiming that he only fled because he realised that the agency had decided to make him the scapegoat.
The second mole
In the 1970s the Americans had sent submarines and deep-sea divers into Soviet waters and installed wiretaps on undersea communication cables used by the Soviets in a programme called Ivy Bells. These were all detected and destroyed in 1980. Yurchenko gave the Americans a second mole, an NSA analyst who had given the Soviets precise information about Ivy Bells. The Americans finally identified a 44-year-old former NSA computer analyst named Ronald Pelton as the mole.
After the high
After a month or so, Yurchenko’s mood seemed to change. He seemed less enthusiastic, less energetic. His handlers thought he was missing female companionship and talked about introducing him to some, but Yurchenko wasn’t interested. He wanted to meet his former mistress from the time he was posted in Washington, a Soviet paediatrician named Valentina Yereskovsky who was married to a diplomat. The couple was now based in Montreal. He confided that his dream was to:
live in some relatively remote area of the United States with a Russian-speaking woman who could take care of him.
His handlers tried to reunite him with his former mistress. They worked with Canadian intelligence and took him to her doorstep in Montreal while her husband was away at work. Yurchenko rang the doorbell. She took one look at him, listened to what he had to say, told him off, denouncing him as a traitor [which he was], and slammed the door in his face.
Hey, loser, you’re a defector now. It was fun at the time, but I’m not going to leave my husband and my kids.
While he was in Montreal he picked up a newspaper and read a story about the CIA having bagged a high-ranking KGB defector: him. Yurchenko was heartbroken and livid, and felt betrayed by the CIA.
Now what
The CIA decided Yurchenko needed to get out of the tedium of safehouse life, and took him on a road trip around the southwest. When they returned to the safehouse, CIA doctors informed him that his stomach pains weren’t due to cancer. It was a minor bowel disorder. Paradoxically, the news that he wasn’t dying crushed Yurchenko. Rochford felt that one of Yurchenko’s motives for defecting was the belief that he was about to die, and he wanted to make the world right before he did. When he found out that he wasn’t, in fact, dying, just days after being rejected by the woman he hoped to spend his life with, his motivation for defecting crumbled.
“It’s not your fault”
On 2 November 1985, Yurchenko convinced his CIA guard into taking him shopping. After making a phone call from a payphone, the two went to a restaurant in Georgetown, a French restaurant, Au Pied de Cochon. He asked what America did to defectors who tried to escape. Where they shot, he wanted to know. When his guard assured him that America did no such thing, Yurchenko stood and told the guard he was leaving.
If I don’t come back, it’s not your fault.
Yurchenko walked for 20 minutes and reached the Soviet embassy. Three months after he had defected to the United States, Vitaly Yurchenko had defected back.
Soviet embassy, Washington D.C.
Yurchenko’s redefection was a massive embarrassment for the CIA and the FBI. It was compounded when, two days later, during a press conference at the same Soviet embassy, Yurchenko accused the Americans of drugging and abducting him in Rome, and holding him against his wishes in a safehouse in Virginia. A few days later he was back in Moscow, welcomed as a hero of the Soviet Union.
This complicated things for the CIA which expended considerable energy in trying to figure out — and explain — just what had happened. There were those who doubted everything he told the Americans during the debriefs, and a lot of effort was expended in double and triple checking things that, until 2 November, had been considered facts.
Outcome
Yurchenko’s defection to the US is also believed to have achieved an important outcome for the Soviets. Even though Edward Lee Howard — who was identified by Yurchenko as a Soviet asset — had fled to Moscow via Helsinki in 1985, the KGB continued detecting and neutralising CIA assets in the USSR at a rapid clip.
Aldrich Ames, the CIA agent who had debriefed Yurchenko, was working as a KGB asset since April 1985. There is speculation that it was Ames who betrayed Tolkachev. But with Howard identified as the mole and a few more successful attempts by the Soviets to throw the FBI off Ames’ scent, Ames managed to evade detection and continued spying for the Soviets till 1993 when the FBI and CIA placed him under surveillance.
Given this, there has been speculation that Yurchenko’s defection was part of the KGB’s plan to shield Ames from discovery. But interviews conducted recently with retired KGB officers including the then head of Soviet counterintelligence put paid to that conspiracy theory.
Milton Bearden was a former CIA officer who was involved in debriefing Yurchenko. In the early 2000s he travelled to Moscow to conduct research for a book and met his former adversaries, KGB officers from that era. He asked them what they felt about Yurchenko. They were quite clear that Yurchenko was still alive, working as a security officer at a bank:
And one day if there was any justice, his body would be found “somewhere along the Moscow River.”
Shaunak Agarkhedkar writes spy novels. His first two — Let Bhutto Eat Grass & Let Bhutto Eat Grass: Part 2 — are set in 1970s India, Pakistan, and Europe.