Word: yurchenko
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...balmy July morning in Rome a visiting Soviet "diplomat" took a stroll with some of his colleagues near the Vatican. "I'll join you later at the embassy," he told his companions. "I want to visit the Vatican museums." Vitaly Yurchenko walked off on his own. That, apparently, was the last the Soviets ever saw of him. Shortly after Yurchenko vanished, the embassy asked Italian authorities to investigate the disappearance. "We looked everywhere," said an Italian Foreign Ministry spokesman. "In hospitals, morgues, insane asylums, hotels, camping grounds--nothing...
...fact, Italian intelligence officials knew what had happened: Yurchenko, 50, one of the highest-ranking agents in the KGB, the Soviet intelligence organization, had defected to the West. He has reportedly been sequestered somewhere in the U.S. for the past six weeks, undergoing debriefing by the CIA. Reagan Administration officials said that Yurchenko has provided details of KGB operations in Europe and the U.S. and information about the "spy dust" that Soviet secret police allegedly used to track Americans in Moscow. He has also fingered as many as six former CIA agents who worked as "moles" for the Soviet Union...