On December 18, 1975, Shadrin was sent to meet the KGB in Vienna. Shadrin agreed to a second meeting with the KGB two days later, on December 20. Then, he simply vanished.
The U.S. government initially asked Ewa Shadrin to cover for her husband’s absence and to remain quiet while efforts were made to secure his release. She was told at one point that Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, would raise the issue with the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin.
At first, Ewa cooperated with the government’s requests. But eventually it became clear to her that her husband had been sent to Vienna without adequate protection, and her attempts to get answers to her questions were met with cold silence.
In 1976, a few months after Shadrin’s disappearance, his case began to get presidential attention, when President Gerald Ford asked Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev about Shadrin’s whereabouts. Brezhnev responded that Shadrin had indeed met with representatives of the Committee for State Security in Vienna on December 18, 1975, to discuss his repatriation to the Soviet Union, but he said he had failed to show for a second scheduled meeting. Brezhnev said he had no further information about Shadrin but could assure the American President that he was not in the Soviet Union. President Carter raised the Shadrin case again with Brezhnev but got the same answer.
Shadrin’s fate had remained a mystery until Yurchenko had arrived with the answer. He told the CIA that Shadrin had died in a botched kidnapping by the KGB. Thrown into the trunk of a car for the drive across the Austrian border, Shadrin had been drugged to keep him quiet. But the KGB had mistakenly given him an overdose, and when the KGB men stopped their car and opened the trunk to check on their prisoner, they found that he was dead.
When Yurchenko told the CIA about Shadrin’s death, he warned his debriefers that this was one of the darkest secrets of the KGB. Brezhnev had lied to two American Presidents about Shadrin, so the credibility of the head of state was on the line. Yurchenko made it clear to the CIA that if Moscow ever found out that he had revealed the truth about Shadrin, the KGB would go after Yurchenko’s family and property. Yurchenko, like Shadrin before him, would be sentenced to death in absentia. It was no wonder he was afraid he might have to testify in court. Perhaps the CIA was trying to ensure that Yurchenko could never go home again.
Santa Fe, 1530 Hours, October 28, 1985
Jack Platt sat across from Mary Howard in a room at the La Quinta motel in Santa Fe. Of those in the intelligence world who knew her at all, Platt probably knew her best. He’d assessed Mary as a hard worker, but Ed’s dominance over her was total. But he wasn’t a marriage counselor. Platt’s job was to get the young Americans up to speed in a matter of a few months and then to send them into the Moscow grinder. It was true, however, that many of the spouses bonded with him and came to look on the gruff ex-Marine as a father figure. Mary was one of those, and he liked her no-nonsense approach to a difficult job.
He recalled how well she had handled herself when she and Howard had been arrested in an elaborately staged drug bust in Washington. The couple had been given the task of recovering a dead-dropped half-pint milk carton, ostensibly loaded with microfilm from a site near the Maine Avenue marina. Just as Howard unloaded the dead drop, both he and Mary were arrested with the violence typical of a drug bust. They were immediately separated. Mary was thrown into the back of a car with one of the FBI’s “Gs” who had become famous for his ability to play the role of a drug addict/dealer. On the ride to the FBI’s Washington Field Office, the G in the car with Mary Howard kept her in a state of near terror as he moaned and complained loudly to the driver that he would vomit if he wasn’t let out of the car immediately. Through all this, Mary remained tearful but silent, even when the FBI agent came into the interrogation room with the “results” of the lab tests on the milk carton she and Howard had retrieved: #3 heroin.
Meanwhile, in a separate WFO interrogation room, Howard had quickly broken cover with the FBI agent playing the role of his attorney. Almost immediately, Howard was ready to shrug off the bust as a joke, while his wife was hanging tough in another room. The arrest was not graded in a formal sense, but Howard had a hard time accepting that Mary had performed more stoically. Platt had come to like and respect the mild-mannered young woman, perhaps more than her husband. But in the end, Howard had done well enough to get Platt’s clearance to enter the Moscow pipeline.
Now, sitting here in the aftermath of Howard’s escape, Mary Howard was attempting to deal with her nightmare, and with the truth. The FBI had maintained full coverage on Mary Howard, including a much belated dispatch of the Gs to Santa Fe, to watch Mary in case she, too, decided to make a break for it. Platt had been asked by the FBI to go to Santa Fe to hold Mary’s hand and nudge her into full cooperation.
Mary knew she was in over her head. After Howard’s escape, in which she had played a supporting role, the FBI told her that her son’s future depended on how she responded to the bureau’s request for a full account of what she knew about her husband’s involvement with the Soviets. Mary came to fear that her son might not only be without a father, but could be without a mother if she didn’t cooperate. So she began to talk, and she sat for two difficult polygraph sessions. Before the polygrapher strapped her to the machine, Platt told Mary Howard, “Just tell the truth.”
After the polygraph sessions, the FBI was satisfied that Mary was not guilty of any criminal acts, since no warrant had been issued for her husband’s arrest at the time she helped him escape. The bureau was convinced that Mary was not involved in her husband’s suspected espionage, although she provided valuable insights into Howard’s actions. Platt saw a new strength developing in Mary.
Before Platt left Santa Fe, Mary Howard received a phone call from a Russian, who told her that her husband was safe and well. The call was probably from Moscow, routed via Switzerland, which was as far as the FBI could trace it.
Washington, D.C., October 31, 1985
The Shadrin story broke in the press as fast as I had predicted, and Yurchenko’s name was mentioned prominently as the source of the new information about Shadrin’s death at the hands of the KGB. Now, Yurchenko felt he could no longer trust the CIA.
Burton Gerber had issued a standing order that Yurchenko should not be brought inside the twenty-five-mile radius around Washington unless he had a business or medical appointment, or unless Gerber had given prior approval to the trip. The point of moving him out to Coventry had been to put him outside the zone in which Russian intelligence officers from the Washington Rezidentura could legally operate; bringing him back downtown placed him at risk of exposure to the Soviets, Gerber believed. But on Halloween, with Yurchenko’s mood worsening, Medanich and a CIA security officer took Yurchenko down to watch the wild Halloween parade and street festival in the city’s Georgetown neighborhood. Yurchenko and his watchers mingled with thousands of partyers along the jammed streets.
Gerber didn’t authorize the trip. He didn’t even hear about the Halloween outing until two nights later, after Yurchenko and one CIA security guard went back to Georgetown one more time.
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Coventry, November 2, 1985
Yurchenko waited until there was just one CIA security officer on duty and then said he was restless and wanted to go for a drive. In violation of standing orders requiring that he be accompanied by more than one security officer when out in public, the young officer, Tom Hannah, agreed to take him for a ride. Yurchenko told Hannah that he wanted to go shopping, so the two headed up Interstate 95 toward Washington and stopped at a mall in Manassas, Virginia. Yurchenko went into Hecht’s, where he’d been once before with his CIA handlers, and ducked into the dressing room to try on some clothes. Later, after his escape, CIA officers noticed that there was a pay phone by the dressing room. Was it possible, they wondered, that he had noticed the pay phone on his earlier shopping trip and maneuvered his security guard back to the store so he could place a call to the Soviets?
After the side tri
p to Hecht’s, Yurchenko told Hannah he wanted to try French food for dinner and suggested they drive into Georgetown. Hannah knew that Yurchenko and his escorts had been to Georgetown just two nights before, so he figured it was okay to go back again.
After ordering at the Georgetown restaurant Au Pied de Cochon, Yurchenko quietly made his move. He told the inexperienced Hannah that if he didn’t come back, it wasn’t his fault, and then he simply walked out the door. Inexplicably, Hannah sat and waited for a time before calling to notify anyone that the biggest defector in CIA history had walked out on him.
Hannah finally called Colin Thompson at his home, just as Thompson was on his way out the door to meet a date. Thompson told Hannah to call him back at his date’s home if Yurchenko didn’t come back in the next few minutes. By the time Thompson arrived at the woman’s home, Hannah called again in a panic, and Thompson finally agreed to come down to Georgetown to help look for the Russian. He was soon joined by others from the CIA and FBI, all of whom began to search through Georgetown’s streets. Thompson hoped at first that Yurchenko might have ducked in to see a Russian film playing at a nearby theater, and both the CIA and FBI kept up the search through the night.
As soon as he was notified of Yurchenko’s disappearance, Burton Gerber thought: He’s gone back. He knew that the street-by-street search in Georgetown would be fruitless, and he grew increasingly angry and frustrated by the sloppy way his officers had handled Yurchenko that night. He blew up during a rancorous telephone conversation with Thompson, who seemed far too casual and unapologetic about the whole affair. Yurchenko’s disappearance effectively ended Thompson’s career in the Soviet Division and any hope he had for advancement at the CIA. He spent his last years at the agency in the defector program, trying to prove that he could, in fact, work well with them.
Soviet Embassy, Washington, D.C., November 2, 1985
It was late when Viktor Cherkashin was summoned to the Soviet embassy. He met KGB Rezident Stanislov Androsov in the parking lot. Standing in the parking lot, where no one could hear their conversation, Androsov told Cherkashin that Yurchenko was back.
Cherkashin was stunned. He blurted out a few well-chosen Russian words to express his feelings about this increasingly bizarre situation. Then he went up to the apartment where Yurchenko was being kept under the watchful eye of a security guard. Cherkashin assumed his best stage presence to convince Yurchenko that he was happy to see him. He hugged him and welcomed him back into the fold.
Cherkashin didn’t believe Yurchenko’s story—that he had been drugged and kidnapped and forced to reveal secrets. But he and Androsov immediately saw the opportunity presented by Yurchenko’s change of heart.
Reston, Virginia, 0330 Hours, November 3, 1985
The first call came from Burton Gerber.
“Milton, when did you last see Yurchenko?”
I thought for a moment. “About a week ago. Maybe a little longer. It was when I told him about the Shadrin business. Why?”
“You haven’t heard?” Gerber was incredulous. “He walked away from his security officer last night in Georgetown. Didn’t anyone call you?”
“Not until you just called.”
“He’s redefected.”
My mind was racing, thinking back on my last meeting with Yurchenko.
“I’m not so sure. Maybe he’s just kicking back and telling us to ease off him.” I wasn’t convinced by my own argument, but I felt I had to throw something in the mix.
“He’s redefected.” Gerber paused and then added, “Get in touch with Colin.”
I had barely hung up the phone when the second call came in, this one from Ed Juchniewicz, the number two man in the Directorate of Operations.
“Did you fuck up the Yurchenko thing?”
“Ed, I’m not even convinced Yurchenko’s redefected.”
“What the fuck you think he did, run off to get laid?”
“Maybe something not far from that. He might have just decided he needed to write himself a three-day pass.”
Juchniewicz was silent for a moment. “Don’t try taking that to the bank. Your buddy’s gone.” Then the phone went dead.
The mystery of Yurchenko’s whereabouts was solved Monday afternoon. Beginning at around 3:00 P.M., the press officer at the Soviet embassy started alerting select members of the Washington press corps that there would be a press conference at 5:30 that afternoon, at which time they would be able to put some questions to Colonel Vitaly Yurchenko. The State Department didn’t find out what was going on until 4:00 P.M., when it received an official protest delivered by the Soviet embassy, complaining of the “criminal act committed against V. S. Yurchenko.”
At the press conference, Yurchenko, flanked by Minister Viktor Isakov, the interpreter Vitaly Churkin, and a third Soviet official, Vladimir Kulagin, sat at a green felt–covered table in the reception room of the Soviet embassy. The room was filled with American and foreign reporters, as well as a large number of Soviet embassy officials. Yurchenko, clearly breaking with what was supposed to have been a more scripted session, switched erratically from Russian to English, often leaving his interpreter in midsentence. But the story he told was one that fit neatly with the Soviet view of how America’s “special services” operated against Russian intelligence officers. He wove a tale of kidnapping and incarceration.
“I was forcibly abducted in Rome by some unknown persons. . . . Unconscious, I was brought from Italy to the U.S.A. . . . Here I was kept in isolation . . . forced to take drugs, and denied the possibility to get in touch with official Soviet representatives.”
Back at CIA headquarters, senior officers in the SE Division watched the press conference in Gerber’s office. We were largely silent until Yurchenko began to rail against his CIA tormentors. Then Redmond broke the silence.
“He’s using the Bitov defense,” he said. He was referring to Oleg Bitov, who’d defected to the British in 1983 and after one year had changed his mind and redefected to the Soviet Union. Bitov had claimed that he’d been kidnapped and controlled by mind-altering drugs for the entire year, during which he had made a series of public appearances denouncing the Soviet Union. The Soviets welcomed Bitov back in the fold, using his redefection for propaganda purposes. It bolstered the KGB claim that Western special services often resorted to the use of kidnapping and drugs.
During his CIA debriefings, Yurchenko had provided an insider’s view of the Bitov hoax, which he had said was just another case in which the KGB could knock the Western intelligence services off balance with a lie. But now, on the television screen, Yurchenko was saying that he’d been in a fog most of the time during his CIA captivity and that his CIA minders had used the drugs as a means to “deceive the government, including Mr. Casey,” into thinking that he was a willing defector. The KGB colonel described in detail the “contract” the CIA had forced him to sign, wherein he would receive $1 million as a bonus, with an annual stipend of $62,500 with inflation adjustment, plus $48,000 to pay for furnishings.
“The price of doing business just went up,” I said. “Now everybody is going to want the Yurchenko deal.”
The press conference lasted a little over an hour, with Yurchenko generally holding his own through the questions about Howard and Shadrin. Each time he would say, often through his slick interpreter, that the first he had heard any of these names was when he read them in the American press. He would go on to say that he was able to resist the questioning, except when he was drugged. Then he would be presented with signed “confessions,” written in his own hand and revealing what he thought must have been state secrets. Similarly, his CIA interrogators would play tape recordings of him giving up state secrets, he said, but always when he was under the influence of the CIA’s drugs.
By the end of the press conference, the Soviets had scored propaganda points. And the CIA was quickly faced with a flood of accusations that Yurchenko’s redefection was the result of poor handling by the agency.
The timing
could not have been worse. It coincided with two other high-profile cases of botched defections from the Soviet Union. In Kabul, Afghanistan, a Soviet soldier had walked into the American embassy and requested asylum. Over a period of several weeks, the Americans had rebuffed Moscow’s demands that the young soldier be handed back, until the soldier himself had changed his mind and returned to the Soviet fold.
The second incident was the attempted defection of a sailor from a Soviet merchant ship in New Orleans. Twice he jumped aboard an American Coast Guard cutter, and twice he was returned to his ship by the Americans. Both incidents were so recent that the Yurchenko case seemed to provide final proof that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way the United States was handling would-be defectors.
Yurchenko’s face again filled the television screen. This time his rambling answer to a question about Shadrin directly touched the small group assembled in the CIA office. “Mr. Gaihrber,” Yurchenko said in his heavy accent, “aren’t you ashamed?”
I looked for a reaction in Gerber’s face. He had already anticipated taking a hit for the Ed Howard affair . . . and now this.
U.S. Department of State, 1800 Hours, November 5, 1985
I slipped by the press and television crews gathered at the C Street entrance of the State Department. The media was already staked out for Yurchenko’s arrival at Foggy Bottom for the 6:00 P.M. “confrontation,” a scripted protocol to determine whether Yurchenko was freely returning to the Soviet Union. When a Soviet official defected to the United States, the Soviets would request an interview with the defector to ask if he or she had made the choice without coercion. In most cases, Soviet defectors refused to meet the Soviet authorities because they felt such meetings were incriminating. The United States was under no obligation to make the defectors available to the Soviets. But on the rare occasions when a Soviet redefected, the United States insisted on a meeting at the State Department to give the Soviet one last chance to change his mind. Yurchenko had refused the Soviet request for a confrontation in August, hoping that he could simply fade from the scene. Tonight, the Soviets were coming with apparent relish for this reverse confrontation. I planned to be at the meeting on the outside chance that Yurchenko would see me and change his mind. It was a long shot—nobody was banking on it.
The Main Enemy Page 16