Word: yurchenko
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After the woman spurned Yurchenko, he became morose. He had trouble sleeping. A bit of a hypochondriac, Yurchenko insisted on drinking only boiled water. He supposedly had wanted the news of his defection kept secret, and was quite upset that the stories about Howard and Shadrin had been leaked to the press...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Yurchenko also was the victim of a romance gone sour. According to intelligence experts, Yurchenko was deeply in love with the wife of a Soviet diplomat whom he had met while posted in Washington. After Yurchenko defected, the CIA arranged for him to visit the woman in Ottawa, where her husband is now assigned. Exactly what happened is not known, but in the end she rejected him. (In what appears to be only an eerie coincidence, the wife of a Soviet trade official committed suicide in Toronto last week by jumping from her 27th-floor apartment. Canadian and U.S. authorities...