Word: kgb
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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According to his CIA biography, released at the end of last week, Yurchenko, 49, is indeed a master spy. He served as a submarine navigation officer for a year before joining the KGB in 1960. After several assignments in naval counterintelligence and security, he became in 1972 deputy chief of the third department of the KGB's Third Chief Directorate, a daunting mouthful that essentially meant Yurchenko helped recruit and run foreign agents. Yurchenko came to Washington in 1975, charged with overseeing security arrangements for the embassy. In 1980 Yurchenko returned to Moscow, where he became head of the section...
...while under FBI surveillance; he is now believed to be in Moscow.* The CIA also leaked word that Yurchenko had solved the mystery of Nicholas Shadrin, a defector who, while working for the CIA, disappeared in Vienna in 1975. Yurchenko said that Shadrin had been kidnaped and killed by KGB agents...
...prevailing view within the CIA is that Yurchenko was a genuine defector who grew homesick. The CIA paints Yurchenko at the time of his defection as an unhappy man, disenchanted with the KGB, fed up with his wife of nearly 30 years and teenage son, and eager for a fresh start in the West. Indeed, Yurchenko may have contemplated switching sides long ago. During his Washington stay in the late 1970s, according to one high-level source, Yurchenko became friendly with the FBI agents whom he met in his job and began trading tidbits of information...
Some in Washington feel that Yurchenko was a KGB plant all along, that his defection in Rome was just a ruse. They say it is nonsense to believe that he was a real defector who decided to go back and face likely death because of a change of heart. Given his apparent access to the names and details of KGB agents in the U.S. and other nations, a former senior CIA counterintelligence official argues, a flood of arrests and expulsions would have followed his debriefings if his defection were legitimate. Instead, the skeptics point out, Yurchenko offered only meager pickings...
...believe his defection was real counter by saying that Yurchenko may have been holding back information for his own reasons, parceling it out carefully as he watched how the CIA treated him. The official CIA line is that Yurchenko was in fact quite forthcoming and supplied details about the KGB network in the U.S. and abroad. As for Reagan's downplaying of Yurchenko's revelations, some espionage experts contend that it is the only sensible response for a President who wants to keep Moscow guessing how much the U.S. now knows about Soviet operations...