Word: yurchenko
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Dates: during 1985-1985
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...strange saga of espionage crossovers that has kept heads spinning in intelligence communities East and West took yet another turn last week. In this round, Washington was the victim. U.S. officials acknowledged that an ex-CIA officer had been fingered as a Soviet spy by Vitaly Yurchenko, a top- ranking official of the KGB, Moscow's intelligence organization, who defected to the West in July. The accused agent was identified as Edward Lee Howard, 33, who worked for the CIA as recently as June 1983, evidently in the agency's clandestine service. As if that were not damaging enough, officials...
After Howard failed a routine lie detector test, the posting was canceled, and he was fired by the agency. Howard returned to his native New Mexico and became a bona fide economic analyst for the state legislative finance committee. After Yurchenko began identifying KGB "assets" in the U.S. during a lengthy debriefing, the FBI started a thorough background check on Howard, including interviews with co-workers and neighbors. Howard was last seen at his office on Sept. 21, a Saturday. The next day his supervisor found a letter announcing his resignation for "personal reasons." It is assumed that Howard fled...
...News that Howard could have caused a security leak "as serious as anything this country has seen in the past." Howard's case, moreover, may be just the beginning. U.S. sources told TIME that as many as five more Americans may be indicted for espionage on the basis of Yurchenko's debriefing, perhaps as early as this week...
...Yurchenko is believed to be the most senior KGB defector since the 1930s, when two generals in the Soviet intelligence service fled the U.S.S.R. during Stalin's purges. He was a top-ranking member of the KGB's first chief directorate; specifically, he was assigned to the K directorate, which is responsible for penetrating other intelligence services. From 1975 to 1980 he served in Washington as a first secretary at the Soviet embassy and presumably had knowledge of Soviet agents and moles in the U.S. After returning to Moscow, says one intelligence source, he handled liaison between...
...Yurchenko's defection sent a major shock wave through the mysteriously intertwined network of East-West espionage, which has been vibrating all summer with a series of defections and reactions. Three weeks after Yurchenko's disappearance, Hans Joachim Tiedge, a senior official at West Germany's counterintelligence agency, called in sick. Four days later East Germany announced that Tiedge, who had been responsible since 1981 for detecting East German spies in his country, had gone over to the other side. Although he was in debt and had a drinking problem, some Western experts suspect that Tiedge feared exposure...