Word: shevchenko
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...distraught Soviets summoned building guards and demanded an explanation. What had happened to their countryman and boss, Arkady Shevchenko? He was a ranking Soviet diplomat, a former top adviser to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and, for the past five years Under Secretary-General of the U.N., one of Kurt Waldheim's senior deputies. The two Soviets were told that the office had in fact been sealed at Shevchenko's own request the night before. More alarmed than ever, Shevchenko's assistants hurried to their real headquarters, the Soviet mission on East 67th Street in Manhattan...
Five days later the world learned what the Soviets had immediately suspected. SOVIET CITIZEN, WALDHEIM AIDE, DEFECTS AT U.N., read the headline over the front-page story in the New York Times. Shevchenko was his country's highest-ranking diplomatic defector since World War II. At 47 he was already a 22-year veteran of the Soviet foreign service, and he had risen quickly in its ranks. Far more important than his highly visible assignment in New York was the one that occupied him from late 1970 until early 1973 when, as an adviser to Gromyko, he was able...