ARKADI SHEVCHENKO
Shevchenko’s defection, and ensuing denunciation of Soviet foreign policy, was a serious blow, for he had worked at such a high level.
Oleg Kalugin, Spymaster1
Born in the eastern Ukraine in October 1930, Shevchenko’s father was a physician who had been appointed to run a tuberculosis sanatorium on the Black Sea at Yevpatoria. Following the German invasion in 1941, Dr Shevchenko and his staff were evacuated to Siberia but were allowed to return to the Crimea in 1944. Five years later Arkadi graduated from high school and moved to Moscow to attend the State Institute of international Relations, known as MGIMO, a prestigious academic organisation. There he met and married a fellow student, Lina, and he graduated three years later, in 1954.
In 1956, Shevchenko joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and his first overseas experience was a three-month posting to the United Nations in New York in 1958, attached to the Soviet Permanent Mission as a specialist on disarmament issues. In 1962, he was sent to Geneva as a member of the Soviet delegation to the UN disarmament negotiations, and in 1963 was promoted to head the Soviet Mission’s Security Council Division in New York. He remained in New York until 1970 when he was appointed an advisor to the Foreign Minister Anfrei Gromyko. Three years later, Shevchenko was nominated for the post of assistant secretary general, with the rank and status of an ambassador, and it was this change in allegiance that troubled him as, by convention, UN staff are required to pledge allegiance to the organisation, rather than their country of origin. This, of course, was not the Soviet way, as Moscow regarded the UN institution as an opportunity to extend Soviet influence. In his new role, the UN expected Shevchenko to act devoid of national interest, whereas Moscow required him to continue to further the Kremlin’s agenda. The pressure on Shevchenko escalated as he attended a series of international negotiations, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which were intended to introduce bilateral limits on stocks of nuclear weapons. The first stage, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, was intended to restrict the number of missiles deployed against incoming offensive ballistic missiles. Underlying the talks was the principle of eliminating the need to build more and more missiles to maintain the same level of deterrence. Under the terms of the ABMT each side was required to build only two anti-ballistic missile sites which could be armed with no more than 100 interceptors each. On the Soviet side, the ABM under development was the A-35, destined for launch sites at Kolovos and Checknov while the Americans competed with Safeguard, designed by Bell Laboratories but built by Western Elecctric, and equipped with Sprint and Spartan weapons, which were deployed in Cavalier, North Dakota and Conrad, Montana. The purpose of ABMT limit of just two sites was to allow one to cover the nation’s capital, and the other to protect existing ICBM launch areas, and thereby reduce the risk of an escalating arms race. The document was signed in Moscow in May 1972 by President Richard Nixon and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. It was also agreed that both sides would freeze the existing number of launchers, and any new submarine-launched ballistic missiles would require a similar number of land-based launchers to be dismantled. At that time the Soviets had declared a total of 2,568 ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles, whereas the United States possessed 1,754. The disparity in the figures reflected the greater number of free-fall nuclear weapons deployed by the United States Air Force B-52 strategic bombers, and the shorter range missiles located close to Soviet borders. The obvious asymmetry reflected the technical problems encountered by the negotiating teams. For example, the United States wanted to include the new Tu- 22 Backfire bomber on the grounds that it was capable of delivering a nuclear payload to the continental United States, whereas the Soviet side excluded the aircraft, claiming it did not have the necessary range. The Soviets also attempted, unsuccessfully, to include air-launched Cruise missiles. The only parity was in submarine-launched ballistic missiles, which were frozen at 740.
The issue of verification also became an obstacle, with the Soviets opposed to any on-site inspections, denouncing the suggestion as a breach of sovereignty. A settlement reached on ‘national technical means’, which was a combination of signals intelligence and overhead satellite surveillance.
The negotiations were long and complex because of the dynamic nature of the technology, the introduction of multiple warheads, the reliability of the integrated radar systems and the use of decoys. As soon as SALT I had been signed, SALT II negotiations commenced to iron out the unresolved issues, and it was during this second round of talks that Shevchenko made an extraordinary contribution. Codenamed DYMAMITE by the CIA, Arkadi Shevchenko was the most senior Soviet official to defect during the Cold War. As a disarmament expert with the rank of undersecretary general at the United Nations, Shevchenko enjoyed access to all but the very highest classifications of Soviet diplomatic telegrams, and in April 1975 he made contact with the CIA’s station in New York with a view to defecting. There, in a mid-town brownstone safe house on East 64th Street, he was received by the urbane Kenneth Millian, a former station chief in Argentina and Costa Rica, and latterly chief of covert action for the whole of the Latin American region. For the next thirty-two months his CIA case officer, Millian’s deputy, Peter Earnest, liaised closely with him, arranging a regular schedule of meetings every ten days, and both men carried a pager twenty-four hours a day so they could respond instantly if an emergency arose. He also made the arrangements for his eventual escape from his apartment building in April 1978 after he had received an unexpected recall to Moscow ‘for consultations’.
Some years later it emerged that the KGB’s New York rezidentura had become increasingly worried by Shevchenko’s behavior, manifested by frequent absences from his office, heavy drinking and unexplained weekend vacations to Florida. The pressure of his double life was becoming a burden for Shevchenko, and the New York rezident, Yuri Drozdov, reported his concerns to Directorate K in Moscow where General Oleg Kalugin discussed the problem with the FCD director, Vladimir Kryuchkov, but failed to intervene because of Shevchenko’s status and friendship with Andrei Gromyko. However, a further adverse report from Drozdov, who disliked Shevchenko, resulted in the recall.
While Millian’s handling of Shevchenko was to be a model of professionalism, the same could not be said of the rest of the team indoctrinated into DYNAMITE, which happened to include a rather second-rate case officer, Aldrich Ames, a man who was widely known to be a heavy drinker, lazy and unreliable. On one occasion, when Ames had completed a rendezvous with Shevchenko, he accidentally left his briefcase, full of highly compromising classified documents on a New York subway train. Panic ensued, and Ames called an FBI contact who fortunately retrieved the missing item so no harm was done. The incident had no impact on Ames’s career, and soon afterwards he was posted to Mexico City.
Thereafter Shevchenko’s resettlement, a lonely business because his wife Lina died of an overdose in Moscow soon after his defection, was to cause considerable anxiety. In an effort to supply him with female companionship the FBI searched the Washington DC yellow pages for a suitable escort service. Their eventual choice, Judy Chavez, a 22-year- old Georgetown prostitute, later wrote Defector’s Mistress2, much to Shevchenko’s embarrassment. She became his constant companion within three weeks of his defection and remained until October 1978, when she sold her story to the media.
Shevchenko’s autobiography, Breaking with Moscow3, published in 1985, was criticised in an article in the 15 July 1985 edition of New Republic by the American author Edward Jay Epstein who pointed out that certain episodes could not possibly have taken placed as described. He also suggested, incorrectly, that Shevchenko had invented his pre-defection collaboration with the CIA to enhance the interest of his manuscript which, allegedly, did not contain the relevant material when it was first submitted to his original publisher, Michael Korda of Simon & Schuster. He later rewrote it with the help of his American wife, Elaine, whom he married in December 1978, and the revised version was published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York. Epstein dissected the book line by line and concluded that the author had embellished many episodes and invented others to make his story more interesting.
In fact, Shevchenko’s story was largely true although he had embroidered some incidents, including the dramatic circumstances of his defection. After twenty years in the Soviet foreign service, including three as one of Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko’s personal advisor, his conversion represented a considerable coup, particularly since Millian and the small circle indoctrinated into the secret had managed the case for so long without a leak. According to Millian,
the intelligence product was phenomenal. He was much better placed than Penkovsky. It was our first opportunity to get right to the top of the Soviet decision-making machine. He had complete access… he could even go into their coderoom and look at all the latest cables.4
Shevchenko – whose son, Gennady, and daughter, Anna, stayed in Moscow –lived openly in Washington DC under his own name and married a lawyer. He died in 1998.