Word: defector
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...house's furniture, worth about $48,000. He met with Casey over dinner at the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters, but claimed he did not recall the conversation very well because he had been drugged before the meal by agents eager to make Casey think he was a willing defector...
...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 the mystery of Nicholas Shadrin, a defector who, while working for the CIA, disappeared in Vienna in 1975. Yurchenko said that Shadrin had been kidnaped and killed by KGB agents...
...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...
Some in Washington feel that Yurchenko was a KGB plant all along, that his defection in Rome was just a ruse. They say it is nonsense to believe that he was a real defector who decided to go back and face likely death because of a change of heart. Given his apparent access to the names and details of KGB agents in the U.S. and other nations, a former senior CIA counterintelligence official argues, a flood of arrests and expulsions would have followed his debriefings if his defection were legitimate. Instead, the skeptics point out, Yurchenko offered only meager pickings...