Word: sovietize
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...answers were vague or contradictory. He refused to explain how he had escaped from the CIA. He said he had been held in isolation, but when one reporter identified himself, Yurchenko mentioned he had received a letter from him during his alleged captivity. Prompted by questions from two Soviet correspondents, Yurchenko compared his kidnaping to "state-sponsored terrorism" and accused the U.S. of "hypocrisy" for preaching about human rights yet violating his. As farfetched as his tale was, it provides the Soviets with a handy riposte at home and abroad to undercut Reagan when he brings up Soviet human rights...
...head of the section responsible for, among other things, ferreting out double agents and leaks within the KGB. In April of this year Yurchenko was named deputy chief of intelligence operations in the U.S. and Canada, a position that theoretically would allow him to know the identity of every Soviet agent in those countries. Reports that Yurchenko was the No. 5 man in the KGB are overblown, according to an intelligence source, but he "was a very senior person who had a high-ranking position within the organization...
...late July Yurchenko arrived in Rome from Moscow and was driven to Villa Abamelek, the Soviet embassy compound on the city's outskirts. On the morning of July 28, according to original accounts, Yurchenko told his guards he wanted to go by himself to the Vatican museums, less than a mile away. He never returned. Though stories have circulated about how Yurchenko disappeared, including an account carried this month by Actuel, a French magazine, which claims that Yurchenko met his CIA contact in the Sistine Chapel, U.S. officials refuse to reveal details. The State Department, however, reiterated last week that...
Yurchenko's defection was not publicly acknowledged by Administration officials until late September. Privately, U.S. officials credited him with supplying information about the "spy dust" that Soviet secret police supposedly used to track Americans in Moscow. Yurchenko blew the whistle on Edward Lee Howard, the former CIA trainee who allegedly gave Moscow information about a U.S. agent in the Soviet Union. Howard, who had been fired by the agency in 1983, vanished two months ago in Santa Fe while under FBI surveillance; he is now believed to be in Moscow.* The CIA also leaked word that Yurchenko had solved...
...depression is the constant enemy of any defector, and Soviets seem especially prone to what intelligence experts call "the postpartum blues." Yurchenko's case reminded many diplomats of Soviet Journalist Oleg Bitov, who returned to Moscow last year after defecting to Great Britain in 1983. Though Bitov offered a kidnap tale similar to Yurchenko's, British officials are convinced that both men simply had a change of heart. "A feeling arises that . . . 'Mother Russia beckons,' that the West, nice as it has been, is not 'me,' " explains a British intelligence officer...