The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

. . . Unconscious, I was brought from Italy to the U.S.A. . . . Here I was kept in isolation . . . forced to take drugs, and denied the possibility to get in touch with official Soviet representatives.”

Back at CIA headquarters, senior officers in the SE Division watched the press conference in Gerber’s office. We were largely silent until Yurchenko began to rail against his CIA tormentors. Then Redmond broke the silence.

“He’s using the Bitov defense,” he said. He was referring to Oleg Bitov, who’d defected to the British in 1983 and after one year had changed his mind and redefected to the Soviet Union. Bitov had claimed that he’d been kidnapped and controlled by mind-altering drugs for the entire year, during which he had made a series of public appearances denouncing the Soviet Union. The Soviets welcomed Bitov back in the fold, using his redefection for propaganda purposes. It bolstered the KGB claim that Western special services often resorted to the use of kidnapping and drugs.

During his CIA debriefings, Yurchenko had provided an insider’s view of the Bitov hoax, which he had said was just another case in which the KGB could knock the Western intelligence services off balance with a lie. But now, on the television screen, Yurchenko was saying that he’d been in a fog most of the time during his CIA captivity and that his CIA minders had used the drugs as a means to “deceive the government, including Mr. Casey,” into thinking that he was a willing defector. The KGB colonel described in detail the “contract” the CIA had forced him to sign, wherein he would receive $1 million as a bonus, with an annual stipend of $62,500 with inflation adjustment, plus $48,000 to pay for furnishings.

“The price of doing business just went up,” I said. “Now everybody is going to want the Yurchenko deal.”

The press conference lasted a little over an hour, with Yurchenko generally holding his own through the questions about Howard and Shadrin. Each time he would say, often through his slick interpreter, that the first he had heard any of these names was when he read them in the American press. He would go on to say that he was able to resist the questioning, except when he was drugged. Then he would be presented with signed “confessions,” written in his own hand and revealing what he thought must have been state secrets. Similarly, his CIA interrogators would play tape recordings of him giving up state secrets, he said, but always when he was under the influence of the CIA’s drugs.

By the end of the press conference, the Soviets had scored propaganda points. And the CIA was quickly faced with a flood of accusations that Yurchenko’s redefection was the result of poor handling by the agency.

The timing could not have been worse. It coincided with two other high-profile cases of botched defections from the Soviet Union. In Kabul, Afghanistan, a Soviet soldier had walked into the American embassy and requested asylum. Over a period of several weeks, the Americans had rebuffed Moscow’s demands that the young soldier be handed back, until the soldier himself had changed his mind and returned to the Soviet fold.

The second incident was the attempted defection of a sailor from a Soviet merchant ship in New Orleans. Twice he jumped aboard an American Coast Guard cutter, and twice he was returned to his ship by the Americans. Both incidents were so recent that the Yurchenko case seemed to provide final proof that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way the United States was handling would-be defectors.

Yurchenko’s face again filled the television screen. This time his rambling answer to a question about Shadrin directly touched the small group assembled in the CIA office. “Mr. Gaihrber,” Yurchenko said in his heavy accent, “aren’t you ashamed?”

I looked for a reaction in Gerber’s face. He had already anticipated taking a hit for the Ed Howard affair . . . and now this.

U.S. Department of State, 1800 Hours, November 5, 1985

I slipped by the press and television crews gathered at the C Street entrance of the State Department. The media was already staked out for Yurchenko’s arrival at Foggy Bottom for the 6:00 P.M. “confrontation,” a scripted protocol to determine whether Yurchenko was freely returning to the Soviet Union. When a Soviet official defected to the United States, the Soviets would request an interview with the defector to ask if he or she had made the choice without coercion. In most cases, Soviet defectors refused to meet the Soviet authorities because they felt such meetings were incriminating. The United States was under no obligation to make the defectors available to the Soviets. But on the rare occasions when a Soviet redefected, the United States insisted on a meeting at the State Department to give the Soviet one last chance to change his mind. Yurchenko had refused the Soviet request for a confrontation in August, hoping that he could simply fade from the scene. Tonight, the Soviets were coming with apparent relish for this reverse confrontation. I planned to be at the meeting on the outside chance that Yurchenko would see me and change his mind. It was a long shot—nobody was banking on it.

The Soviet delegation entered the plush reception room and quickly took their seats. Yurchenko, dressed in a new gray suit and matching tie, was accompanied by the embassy minister, Viktor Isakov; press counselor Boris Malakhov; and Vitaly Churkin, their interpreter. The American side was represented by Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Rosalyn Ridgeway, and two officers from the European bureau. Yurchenko glanced around the room for a familiar face. When he saw me seated across the room, he held my gaze for a split second’s recognition.

Whitehead dispensed with the formalities and quickly got down to business. “The purpose of our meeting here tonight is to determine whether Mr. Vitaly Yurchenko has chosen of his own free will to