VITALI YURCHENKO
It was apparent to me when I read the cables that Yurchenko didn’t know anything about me so that put my mind at ease.
Aldrich Ames in Sell-Out by James Adams1
Convinced that he was suffering from the stomach cancer that had killed his mother, a condition that could only be cured in the United States, 50-year-old Vitali Yurchenko defected to the CIA in Rome on 1 August 1985 while on a mission to find Vladimir Alexandrov, a Soviet nuclear physicist who had gone missing. Upon his arrival at Andrews Air Force Base, he was interviewed by Aldrich Ames, and then debriefed by the FBI’s Bob Wade at a safehouse in Oakton, Virginia. At its height, the joint FBI-CIA task force involved in debriefing Yurchenko amounted to eleven officers.
Formerly the security officer at the Soviet embassy in Washington DC for eight years, he had been disciplined for calling the police when in December 1976 a CIA retiree, Edwin Moore, had tossed a package of secrets over the fence at the Mount Alto compound. After twenty- two years in the CIA’s research division, Moore had accumulated a large quantity of documents that he had valued at $10 million. His initial offer, contained in the bundle thrown into the embassy grounds, included several samples, a price tag of $200,000 and instructions on where to leave the money in Bethesda. The FBI followed up the lead, traced Moore’s home in Bethesda, and he was later sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment but, having suffered a heart attack, was paroled after just three.
Having discussed the incident with the rezident, Boris Yakushin, KGB headquarters in Moscow had decided the package was probably a bomb, when, in fact, it contained classified documents. Yurchenko was estranged from his wife and found it hard to support Piotr, his mentally disabled adopted son.
Probably the most important of Yurchenko’s ‘meal tickets’ was his identification of Ronald Pelton, a former National Security Agency linguist who had left the organisation in July 1979 and, in dire financial straits, began to sell classified material in January 1980 to the KGB’s Washington rezidentura, where the counter-intelligence component was headed by the wily Viktor Cherkashin.
Although the rezidentura had been delighted by this unexpected ‘walk-in’, the staff realised that the FBI’s physical surveillance on the front building would have spotted the bearded man as he entered, so elaborate arrangements were made to change his appearance and smuggle him out of the rear exit. Yurchenko, as the embassy security officer using the alias Vladimir Sorokin, had asked a KGB colleague, Gennadi Vasilenko, to shave off Pelton’s beard and arrange for him to join a minivan that routinely drove employees home at the end of the working day. Pelton was to lie down in the vehicle, shielded from the FBI’s cameras by the other passengers. Trained as a Russian linguist by the United States Air Force, Pelton had served at an intercept site at Peshawar before transferring to the NSA in November 1965. However, he had resigned in July 1979, three months after he had filed for bankruptcy, declaring debts of $65,000, and his financial crisis led him to visit the embassy. The father of four children, Pelton had pursued several money-making schemes, including a fuel-saving device for automobile carburetors, and selling yachts. Separated from his wife, Judith, whom he had married in in 1964 in the town of his birth, Benton Harbor, Michigan, Pelton tried computer consulting and landscaping, but was unsuccessful. In April 1984 he moved in with a girlfriend, Ann Barry, and began to abuse alcohol and drugs.
Over the next five years Pelton met his KGB handler, Anatoli Slavnov, several times, flew to Vienna twice, in October 1980 and again in January 1983, to be debriefed inside the Soviet Embassy compound, and was paid $35,000. Contact was maintained by Slavnov through a telephone call made on the last Saturday of every month to the Pizza Castle restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia. Although Pelton’s information was based on his memory, as he no longer enjoyed access to classified information, he had compromised numerous programmes into which he had been indoctrinated while stationed in Pakistan and then during four years in England from 1966 to 1972.
Because Yurchenko did not recall Pelton’s real name, the FBI was obliged to identify the voice on the five-year-old recording of the unknown visitor to the embassy who had made a call shortly before his appearance. The mole hunt was conducted by the Baltimore Field Office in an operation assigned the random codename PASSERINE, supervised by Ray Batvinis. The task force consisted of twenty agents and analysts along with Internal Revenue Service agents and postal inspectors, plus about one hundred agents involved in support roles and surveillance. The first objective was to trace the voice, and this was quickly achieved on the very first day of the mole hunt when three NSA employees recognised Pelton on the tape. One of the six teams that interviewed NSA Soviet Group staff was provided with Pelton’s name by a colleague with whom he had carpooled over a period of years.
Once the FBI had identified Pelton, and shown his photograph to Yurchenko for confirmation, he became the focus of intensive surveillance over three months which revealed his complicity in a contemporaneous bank fraud, involving $50,000, and he was finally confronted in November 1985 in the Hilton Hotel in Annapolis by Special Agents Dudley Hodgson and David Faulkner who played the tape made five years earlier, on 14 January 1980, of an unidentified man making an appointment at the Soviet embassy. After a second interview later the same day, Pelton offered to act as a double agent to entrap his Soviet contacts but was arrested.
After his conviction in March 1985 Pelton agreed to participate in a damage assessment and he was interviewed at length in a quiet wood cabin on the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, conveniently close to his temporary accommodation in the Ann Arundel County Detention Center. The resulting report remains classified because of the many NSA programmes and operational techniques Pelton described. Until the disclosures of Edward Snowden in 2013, Pelton had probably inflicted more damage on the NSA than any other known individual. Although he had spent most of his career in the NSA’s Soviet group as a Russian linguist, he latterly had been transferred to a section, which exercised financial control over the NSA’s principal projects, and he had been responsible for supervising the budget by moving funds to support under-financed programmes. Inevitably, this position gave him the opportunity to assess the relative performance of particular operations, information that would have been of immense value to the Soviets.
Perhaps the most damaging disclosure was his description of IVY BELLS, an underwater cable-tapping project run in conjunction with the United States Navy, which collected communications traffic at Soviet naval bases and in Libyan territorial waters. Compromised by Yurchenko, the distinctively red-haired Pelton would be arrested by the FBI in November that year. Convicted at his trial in December 1986, he was sentenced to three life terms plus ten years’ imprisonment. He would not be released until November 2015, and he died in September 2022, at the age of 80 in a nursing home in Frederick, Maryland, having converted to Roman Catholicism. He was a gifted pianist and spent his final years living with his son, from whom he had been estranged for most of his life.
Another important counter-intelligence gem was Yurchenko’s disclosure that a disgruntled CIA officer designated ROBERT had been in touch with the KGB in Vienna and had compromised several operations run by the CIA station in Moscow. Yurchenko’s version of this former employee’s behavior neatly dovetailed with a current FBI investigation of Edward Lee Howard, who had been dismissed by the agency in June 1984, shortly after he had been indoctrinated into the station’s local assets. At that moment Howard was under FBI surveillance at his home in Albuquerque, but his was able to use his training to evade the watchers and catch a flight to Helsinki.
After the disappointment of his rejection in Montreal, Yurchenko was escorted on a trip to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, where he was informed that he was not suffering from cancer. He then began to fret that he would be called to give evidence against Pelton and, to make matters worse, learned that news of his defection had been leaked to the media, probably by the DCI, Bill Casey.
Yurchenko re-defected on 31 October 1985, but not before he had given sufficient information for the FBI to identify a spy in the NSA, Ronald Pelton, and learn the full details of how Nikolai Artamonov had perished. He also mentioned that a KGB colleague, Oleg Gordievsky, had been recalled to Moscow recently because he was suspected of being a traitor, and described a source codenamed ROBERT as having supplied CIA secrets to the KGB. He was also able to clear up dozens of loose ends on other counter-intelligence cases and reveal the KGB’s latest tradecraft, including the deliberate brushing of CIA personnel in Moscow with a radio-active spy dust to enable their movements to be monitored.
Unusually, the DCI Bill Casey met Yurchenko several times during his debriefings, entertaining him to dinner twice, and was quite unable to resist spreading the good news of the CIA’s impressive coup. Yurchenko was also alarmed when he was told that he might be obliged to appear as a witness in an action brought against the United States government by Ewa Shadrin, the widow of the naval defector Nikolai Artamonov. Yurchenko, who had been promised total discretion, was understandably dismayed by the leaks and disappointed by his treatment from his CIA Security Division handlers who had failed to show him the respect he felt he deserved, re-defected to the Soviet embassy in Washington DC and called a press conference four days later to complain that he had been abducted by the CIA and drugged.
The heavy drinking counter-intelligence expert had an exaggerated view of what was in store for him and was bitterly disappointed when he was rejected by his former girlfriend, Dr Valentina Yereskovskaya, a beautiful blonde paediatrician and the wife of the Soviet consul general in Montreal. The CIA concluded that it was highly likely that Aldrich Ames, who had been part of his debriefing team, had tipped off the KGB to Yurchenko’s continuing interest in the woman with whom he had previously conducted a lengthy and passionate affair and in whom he remained besotted. Accordingly, when Yurchenko unexpectedly turned up on the doorstep or her apartment in Canada in September 1985, she had almost certainly been warned to throw him out, which is precisely what she did, protesting that she had no intention of defecting with her two daughters.
Yurchenko’s ludicrous claim to have been abducted and drugged was highly reminiscent of the assertions made by the journalist Oleg Bitov who had gone unpunished after he abandoned his recent defection to England. Although Yurchenko’s ploy fooled nobody in the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov found it expedient to accept his version of events. After his retirement from the KGB Yurchenko found work as a bank guard in Moscow.
The phenomenon of re-defection is certainly a rarity, but not entirely unknown. In 1947 Yuri Tasoev, who had been encouraged to desert by Grigori Tokaev, was delivered back to his Soviet colleagues, and in December 1955 the GRUs Ivan Ovchinnikov had much the same experience. Born in January 1929, Ovchinnokov, the son of peasants in Selo Tochilnoye, had joined the Red Army in 1944 and, in September 1949, had been posted to the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow. He later served as a military translator with the rank of lieutenant in a radio intercept regiment based in Stahnsdorf, East Germany. On the night of 4 December 1955, he crossed into the American sector of west Berlin and sought political asylum, asserting that his father had been incarcerated unjustly for thirteen years, a sentence that had killed him. He did not entirely impress his debriefers who could not reconcile his professed attachment to his wife and son, whom he had abandoned. Nevertheless, Ovchinnikov insisted he had been motivated ideologically, and supplied useful information on the Soviet military and group of Soviet forces in Germany, GRU intercept operations and disclosed details of a KGB signal battalion in Stahnsdorf, which monitored Allied military and diplomatic wireless traffic.
In February 1957, Ovchinnikov was re-interviewed by CIA officers to whom he admitted that his defection had not been ideologically motivated, but economically. A few months later he joined Radio Liberty and began to cultivate a small circle of émigrés that appeared anti-American, anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic. His behavior led to conflict with other Radio Liberty staff in August 1958, Ovchinnikov contacted the Soviet embassy in Bonn to negotiate his repatriation. Two months later he returned to East Germany and upon arrival participated in a propaganda broadcast in which he made a public recantation, Ovchinnikov then dropped from sight, and did not reappear until 1974 when someone with the same name identified himself as editor of Veche, a samizdat magazine notorious for its anti- Semitism and nationalism, and someone who had spent a decade in the gulag for a political offence.
If Ovchinnikov did serve a term of imprisonment because of his desertion it was most likely because his crime was so egregious there was no opportunity to claim that he had been a victim of an abduction of the kind that enabled Yurchenko to avoid prosecution. It is highly likely that Yurchenko had tried to emulate Oleg Bitov’s strategy. The 52-year-old deputy editor of the Literary Gazette, Bitov was a KGB co- optee, who defected in Italy while attending the Venice Film Festival in September 1983, only to re-defect to Moscow from London the following August. While in London he wrote a series of articles for the Sunday Telegraph, but, conscious of his family in Moscow, made no sensational disclosure. Initially he had explained that his defection had been prompted by his anger over the destruction of Korean Airlines flight 007 earlier in the month. He was critical of the Kremlin, visited the United States as a guest of Reader’s Digest, but was never going to be in the big league. Without any warning, he had left his flat in East Sheen and abandoned his car, a Toyota Tercel, in Emperor’s Gate, near the Soviet Embassy. He claimed at a press conference that he had been abducted by the British Security Service at gunpoint and drugged, but the reality was that he had succumbed to depression, was anxious about his 15-year-old daughter Xenia, and had been unable to complete a contract for the publication with William Morrow in New York and Hamish Hamilton in London, for his memoirs, Tales I Could Not Tell, which were to be ghost written by Duff Hart-Davis. After a pub lunch with his SIS handler, Bitov had driven to Kensington and presented himself at the embassy where a member of the KGB rezidentura, Oleg Gordievsky, would be informed of his unexpected arrival. After consultations with Moscow, Bitov was issued with a temporary passport and then flown from Heathrow to Sofia and delivered to Moscow. A month after his return Bitov attended a packed press conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ press centre where a nine-page statement was distributed to journalists detailing the ‘provocation’ and this was followed by publication of a three-part article in the Literary Gazette. He was reunited with his brother, Andrei, also a well-known Soviet writer, and in March 1985 engaged in some Kremlin-sponsored propaganda by alleging that the CIA had been implicated in the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II.
Despite knowing the truth, it seems likely that the KGB management may have found it expedient to present Bitov, who after all was never actually a KGB officer, as a survivor of Western aggression rather than acknowledge that he had simply succumbed to second thoughts. Once reestablished in Moscow, Bitov went to work on Vek (Century) a weekly magazine funded by the KGB.
The narrative adopted by the KGB with Bitov and Yurchenko, however improbable, was likely driven by pragmatism, but there was one other reduction that is harder to interpret, although the very unusual circumstances surrounding Yurchenko fueled speculation that he had been sent as a ‘false defector’ on a mission to sew disinformation and maybe divert attention away from such penetrations as Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, and maybe an, as yet, undiscovered third mole.
The only plausible example of a ‘dispatched defector’ is Oleg Tumanov, ostensibly a seaman who swam to the Libyan shore from the destroyer Spravedlivy in November 1966. He was recruited as an editor for Radio Liberty’s Russian broadcasts in Munich, but disappeared suddenly in February 1986, following the defection of Viktor Gundarev to the CIA in Athens. According to his autobiography, Tumanov: Confessions of a KGB Agent2, which was published in 1993 he, like the rest of his family, had been a KGB professional and his unscheduled return to Moscow had brought his penetration mission to a close. However, according to Oleg Kalugin, Tumanov had been a genuine defector who had expressed remorse and disappointment in a letter addressed to a relative but intercepted by three KGB. Tumanov had been traced to Austria by the KGB and pressured into cooperating, the price he had to pay for his re-defection. Allegedly, Tumanov had joined Radio Liberty on KGB instructions, first as an analyst, before he was eventually promoted head of the Russian language service. In Kalugin’s version, which occasionally contradicts Tumanov’s memoirs, Tumanov recruited two other Radio Liberty employees, and in 1981 arranged for the Radio Liberty building to be moved. While Kalugin avoids mentioning Colonel Gundarev by name, he says that
a high-ranking KGB official with knowledge of Tumanov’s KGB ties defected to the West. Tumanov received a big welcome in Moscow, where the KGB portrayed him as a hero who had infiltrated and exposed that foul purveyor or anti-Communist propaganda, Radio Liberty. Our masters of deception claimed he was a KGB officer who had risked life and limb to work in the West. No mention was made of the fact that, twenty years earlier, he had defected from the USSR.3
Kalugin’s version, that Tumanov was recruited by the KGB in Austria, long after his defection is supported by his wife, Yeta Katz, whom he had married in 1973. Born in Riga in 1957, Yeta emigrated to Israel in June 1971, and two years later moved to London where she joined the BBC World Service as a secretary working for the head of the Russian service, Anatoli Goldberg. She met Tumanov on one of his visits to London and they were married within a fortnight. He returned to his job in Munich with Radio Liberty and, having sold her flat in London, she joined him there, finding a job at the United States Army Language Training Center at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. At some point, Tumanov confided to his wife that he was a Soviet agent,
He took the trouble to explain that he really opposes many of the injustices that occur in the Soviet Union and wanted to convince me that his escape from the ship was real. Today I am no longer sure what the truth was.4
Yeta continued to work at the McGraw Kaserne base until February 1986 when her husband disappeared and their apartment was raided. Sacked from her job, Yeta travelled to Berlin in 1987 at the request of her KGB handler, and was questioned by the KGB at Karlshorst, but returned to Munich where she was arrested by the German police and detained for six months while under suspicion of espionage. Under interrogation, she admitted having been recruited by the KGB in 1978, after threats had been made about her parents, who were then still living in the Soviet Union. She was convicted of passing biographical data of her language students to the Soviets and was sentenced to five years’ probation. She stayed in Germany until 1991 when she moved to Tel Aviv to run a multi-lingual business consultancy. In 2008, she went to live in Moscow, reverted to the name Svetlana Tumanova and now lives in an SVR apartment, reportedly a gift from her Karlshorst interrogator, Vladimir Putin.