Word: shevchenko
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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...
Says a former American intelligence officer: "Shevchenko was a very big catch indeed. He had been in a lot of key places deep inside the Soviet apparatus at key times--places where we rarely get any kind of glimpse at all. He had a lot to tell us." Now, seven years later, he is telling the world. His memoir, Breaking with Moscow, is to be published this month (Knopf; 378 pages; $18.95). A resident of Washington, Shevchenko lives comfortably off lecture fees ($6,000 to $12,000 a speech). His American wife Elaine, whom he married in late 1978, helped...
...most sensational revelation in Shevchenko's memoir is that he had been working as an agent-in-place for the CIA for 2 1/2 years before his defection. But the book is far more than a true-life spy story. It is rich in insights into the life of the Soviet elite, the personal rivalries and bureaucratic infighting, the sycophancy and nepotism, and the workings of Kremlin policymaking. Examples...
...concern over the breeder's role in the production-and proliferation-of plutonium, a highly toxic substance that can be used in weapons. The Soviets have a breeder reactor, which is used both to generate electricity and to desalinate water, on line at the Caspian Sea port of Shevchenko. They have a 600,000-kw breeder under construction near Beloyarsk in the Urals. They plan to build even more of these reactors, which, to the joy of power planners and the dismay of many others, produce more plutonium than they consume. Indeed, Mikhail Troyanov, a well-respected and tough...