← The Redefector
The Redefector
Holy Fool | Chapter 10
00:57:24
After two years building a mosaic of research about the Vitaly Yurchenko mystery, finally a full picture emerges: the truth.
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- [00:00]
Julie Cohn
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Order your bag on the app and unlock even more burgers insides available for a limited time at participating restaurants. Tax not included. Price may vary. Not valid within the offer discount or combo. See app for details. This podcast is intended for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised. Okay people, We've come a long way together. We've come a very, very long, twisty rug pulley mind blowy way together. For months, I became consumed with the idea that I'd be able to answer this mystery once and for all with some singular smoking gun. And I hoped that finding Vitaly Yurchenko might provide me with that information. I knew that logically he couldn't be trusted, but I hoped that maybe at this point in his life, he might be willing to set a few things straight. Or if he was still toeing the party line, it would be, you know, interesting to know which line that would be. Would he still would he still claim he was a victim of CIA kidnapping? Or would he have shifted to claiming he was a clever disinformation officer? I just thought that hearing his voice might give us all some sense of finality. The longer I worked on this project, though, the more strained U.S. russia relations have become, and the more dire the implications have become inside Russia for those who step out of line. Just a few months ago, ballerina Ksenia Karolina was sentenced to 12 years in jail on treason charges for donating $51 to a charity supporting Ukraine. The consequences for any little misstep against the state, let alone potentially telling an American journalist that the KGB lied to the whole world about a traitor, are higher than ever. So, in other words, the chances of getting a hold of Yurchenko were slim if he was alive and still in Russia, and the possibility that he would say anything resembling a smoking gun had dwindled to zero, basically. And so here I was, having written hundreds of pages of this podcast and Suddenly realizing that my hope for an ending was going to need a major pivot. And the result of that pivot has been invigorating. First, I doubled down on research in Russian. I don't speak Russian, but I wondered if maybe there were details in Russian media that I hadn't been able to find that might help fill in the gaps in the story. So I hired a Russian speaking researcher who's also a journalist and a translator to comb the Internet himself. And he came up with one article in particular that has been incredibly helpful. And we'll get to that in a moment. But I also spent weeks poring over everything that I had yet again boiling all the intel, making elaborate lists and connections. My office began to look a little serial killer. Y There is a quote that until five minutes ago, I mistakenly thought was from Star Wars. It says, all the answers you need are inside of you. You only have to become quiet enough to hear them. It turns out that's from a self help book by Debbie Ford. But as I re examined all the intel I have been gathering, that quote felt more and more real because a clear answer began to emerge. The answer was a mosaic, and I hadn't seen it until I put all the facts together and stepped back to look at them. So please follow me to my serial killer den from Waveland. I'm Julie Cohn and this is the Redefector. This is chapter 10. Holy fool. The first thing I want to do is test the seams of the plant theory. Does it hold water? Here are the main points of that theory. Point 1. How could someone as high up as Vitaly Orchenko not have known about Rick Ames, Especially since Rick had begun spying for the Soviets almost two months before Yurchenko defected to the U.S. it was a question asked rhetorically by the folks I spoke to who believed Yurchenko was a plant. But several people I spoke to reminded me that the KGB was famous for its extreme compartmentation and that it's very possible, almost likely, that Yurchenko hadn't been looped into that conversation. Here's John Seifer again, the former head of Russia House at the CIA.
- [05:10]
John Cipher
When the Russians get bad information that something happened, they don't think. Could it be a technical thing? Could it be our tradecraft? They're like someone telling there's a spy. They operate with incredible paranoia, incredible security. They're very good at compartmentation.
- [05:25]
David Major
What that means is that all intel is honeycombed and told to the fewest players possible. Since at all times the KGB worries it could have a molecule. So, for example, we know now that no cable traffic was ever exchanged about Rick Ames, and fewer than 10 KGB officers knew about him at the time. According to the reporter and author James Risen, Ames Handler flew to Moscow to deliver the news of his new star mole in person directly to Kryuchkov, then the chief of the KGB's first directorate, which handled foreign intelligence, Yurchenko's boss. In doing so, Ames Handler, a man named Victor Cherkashin, circumvented his entire chain of command, including Yakushkin, then the chief of the American section of the First Directorate. Spy agencies traditionally have allowed counterintel officers to go directly to the top whenever they learned the identities of traitors. And Ames had just handed Cherkashin the names of all the KGB moles working for the CIA. In 1997, the author Pete early interviewed Victor Cherkashin. Cherkashin remembered the night Yurchenko first defected in Rome. He said he received a message on August 1 from his boss, Khrushchkov. Here's the quote he says he told me Yurchenko had disappeared in Rome and was presumed to have defected. The rest of the cable, Cherkashin recalled, was about possible ways to help protect Ames, even though Yurchenko had recently helped oversee KGB clandestine operations targeted at the US And Canada. Kryuchkov wrote in the cable that Yurchenko had not been included in the tightly controlled loop of KGB officers handling aims. But Cherkashin and Kruchkov were both afraid of the possibility that he might have overheard gossip about him somehow. Here's an Khrushchkov gave me two instructions in the cable, said Cherkashin. I was to let Ames know that the KGB was ready to help him escape from the US if he wished. Mr. Kryuchkov also instructed me to determine if it was necessary for us to have a special team flown into the US to silence Yurchenko. I understood this message to mean that Khrushchkov was willing to authorize the immediate execution of Yurchenko, even though he was under the protection of the CIA and the United States. Even if he hadn't known about Ames, Yurchenko was the head of North American espionage. Why didn't he give us more intel? As I pored over my pages of old notes, I saw that Yurchenko had only been given the job of head of North American espionage in April of 1985, four months before his defection. It wasn't a ton of time to get fully up to speed on all things North American espionage, but Even if he did know more than he told his debriefers, apparently that's normal. It's common for defectors not to give away everything they knew as a means to stay relevant. Here's Dan Payne, Yurchenko's bodyguard. He's also a career investigator, and as you'll probably recall, one of the main reasons that the CIA was finally able to uncover Aldrich Ames spying. Yeah.
- [08:31]
John Cipher
So they always keep a little something.
- [08:34]
Julie Cohn
In their back pocket until to pull.
- [08:38]
David Major
It out when they need it.
- [08:42]
Julie Cohn
They give you a lot. They give you a lot to keep you interested and show their worth.
- [08:48]
John Cipher
But they always keep a little bit.
- [08:50]
Julie Cohn
In their back pocket just in the event that they need it.
- [08:54]
David Major
When I asked Mike Rochford, Yurchenko's FBI debriefer about this point, he elaborated on it even further. I should point out that Mike worked to recruit and debrief Soviet defectors for decades after Yurchenko's departure.
- [09:09]
Mike Rochford
Well, he still had more to give us. I mean, one of the last things I remember him saying, he wanted to spend a couple days talking about anonymous volunteers, which, by the way, would have been Hanson. Right. But he wasn't there when Hanson volunteered on October 1st. But in other words, he knew something about anonymous volunteers like Hanson that he would have liked to talk and spend a day or two with. We never got to that conversation. There's always other stuff. Right.
- [09:39]
David Major
We wanted to know if that struck him as odd that this tactic of holding back intel was being used by Yurchenko.
- [09:46]
Mike Rochford
It's by all of them. They always want to feel value. Okay. Always have something. And so it's to their benefit to try and be valuable. Right. The not to hold back. But they have value.
- [10:03]
David Major
There were a number of reasons why he might not be choosing to tell his debriefers everything he knew. But the stuff he did give them, Mike contends, was way too valuable to have been considered chicken feed. As you may remember, Reid pointed out that a lot of the intel we've been given access to, the intel the press has been picking apart, that that was provided by the CIA and doesn't represent the total intel. He actually provided intel which Reid contended was rich. But even still, he may have held some back, Mike says, and that's normal.
- [10:36]
Mike Rochford
And so did he hold stuff back? Yeah. Did he hold stuff back because he didn't get around to it or because he just didn't think, you know, that he needed to share? I don't know. Or because of his power thing and he's holding off for later on, I don't know. He never acted to me like he was being manipulative at their direction, giving us stuff. Because, look, I mean, the stuff he gave up wouldn't. They wouldn't give that up. They don't. Not in a Controlled measures, they don't. Sorry.
- [11:08]
David Major
Controlled measures is another way of saying that he was a plant, a deception campaign. Okay, so there's a very real chance that Yurchenko didn't know about Ames. And as for why didn't he give us more intel? Evidently, it's very common with defectors to be holding some information back. So far, those first two points weren't watertight. Point three, There were two serious deception campaigns run by Soviet double agents after Yurchenko, designed to lead the CIA away from its mole hunt. Why couldn't Yurchenko have just been the first of many? Now, the answer to this is was pretty huge. I heard it over and over and over again. There were such things as fake volunteers, fake walk ins, fake assets, fake double agents, otherwise known as triple agents. But not fake defectors. You heard David Major, explain this one back in episode seven, but I want to touch on it again just to refresh your memories. A Soviet defector is a volunteer who has left a Soviet controlled area and been resettled into a new country, renouncing all ties to the Soviet Union. A double agent, meanwhile, is someone still working for the kgb, say, but secretly sneaking information to the US at the same time. Here's John Cipher.
- [12:32]
John Cipher
I don't think defectors are fake. I think double agents are fake, like prologue and stuff. But the notion that someone would move to the United States and stay here and open yourself up to where the Russians have no control doesn't make any sense. Russians are very careful with information. So to me, the Russian mentality is about control. It's about don't trust anybody. It's about control. The notion that they would allow anybody but an intelligence officer to then go off and live in the midst of your enemies, where you have no control, no means of communication, no means of finding what's going on. You have no idea if that person is doing what you say or not. Or they get over here and they're enamored and they're going to be. So I think the Russians are excellent at creating deception campaigns. I think they're always involved in trying to create false stories. Your point about the Wikipedia still having false information about Yurchenko and stuff. This a game they can't help but play. Active measures, deception, subversion, covert acts. All these Kind of things. It is absolutely part of the Russian mindset. But that mindset is about conspiracy and control. And the notion that they would let people go like Yurchenko or these people to go live in the belly of the beast and be confident that they would never, ever slip or never turn. I just don't see that as a realistic opportunity. They have enough other means to manipulate us that they don't need to necessarily give us somebody in the United States. They can give us people elsewhere.
- [14:08]
David Major
Let's actually compare YURCHOVEN to those two deception agents that were deployed after he left. One was operating in Bonn, West Germany, and the other was operating inside of Moscow. Notably, both were still working for the KGB at the time, meaning they were double agents, not defectors. And neither one of them would agree to sit down with their handlers for any debriefing. It was too risky, they said. And so they communicated almost exclusively via dead drop, meaning the asset would signal that he had new intel, leave it somewhere secret for the CIA to collect, and in return, the CIA would do the same. Hiding payment or follow up questions, you know, in a secret rock or a dead animal and so on. Why go through all that trouble, all the dead drops, everything, specifically, to avoid having to spend any FaceTime with the CIA. Because it's easier to call someone's bluff if you're sitting across from them. There are micro gestures that CIA and FBI officers have been trained to notice. It's hard to lie convincingly in person. Plus, there was always the chance that the enemy might decide to give you truth serum. In my conversation with David Major, the former FBI official agreed. He went so far as to call the notion of fake defectors a myth.
- [15:25]
Oleg Kalugin
There are a lot of myths in this business. One of them, for example, is. Is compromise and blackmail. Blackmail, to my knowledge, has never worked. You try it. But it never worked. Never worked for us, never worked for them. People don't get blackmailed into becoming community traders. Now, every so often, I see this. I see magazines, people write it up. And authors who don't know anything about the business say that. But I don't believe that. I've never seen that to be true. Because why would you blackmail someone to work for you? Would you trust it? I think if. All right, I got an interesting piece of intelligence. I'm going to take it to the President. How do you get it? Well, we blackmail them, boss. That's right. So we. We have tried and never successfully blackmailed anybody.
- [16:17]
David Major
Wow.
- [16:17]
Oleg Kalugin
So that's one of the great myths of this business. I taught a whole course on recruitment and part of the idea blackmail doesn't work because you got to continue to do it every meeting.
- [16:28]
Paul Redmond
To be clear, it still happens all the time. The Russians in particular love blackmail. Remember the nightcrawlers? But the issue is that not many people respond to it. And in cases when they do, you can never be sure that information given to you under duress is solid and one off. Extortion might be one thing, but to run an agent that way requires refreshing the blackmail threat constantly. And David says historically, it just never works long term.
- [16:58]
David Major
He then began to explain that false defectors were a second myth. He said, it's so important to understand that it's a myth because otherwise it would change the way we consider all future walk ins. It would modify the foundations of our assumptions in future counterintelligence work.
- [17:15]
Oleg Kalugin
There's so much myth in this business that you. One of the things you want to do is get rid of the myth. Those are two of the big ones. Blackmail and false effectors. And how do you know that's a myth? Well, what's it based on? Well, it's based on some facts. If you look at cases, all the cases that are taking place, you begin to make conclusions. What have we done in the past? What have we done? What have they done? Could you pull this off?
- [17:42]
David Major
What is the danger of getting it wrong?
- [17:45]
Oleg Kalugin
Oh, huge. If you get this wrong, this whole idea, a false defector, you won't even understand the business. If you think it's highly probable that it has happened, it'll happen again. You can make bad decisions and bad conclusions with that compounds, it's a house of cards. It could begin to collapse.
- [18:05]
David Major
What you're saying makes total sense because you have to be mindful of probabilities.
- [18:09]
Paul Redmond
Otherwise you can start chasing yourself in a wilderness of mirrors at the same time. And here's where I go.
- [18:14]
David Major
In my wilderness, if it were reversed.
- [18:19]
Paul Redmond
I would want to know if I.
- [18:20]
David Major
Was trying to deceive the other guy. If I was trying to deceive you, I would want to do the thing.
- [18:25]
Paul Redmond
That you think I wouldn't do.
- [18:28]
Oleg Kalugin
Yeah.
- [18:30]
David Major
So all of these rules, I mean, basically, as soon as there's a hard.
- [18:33]
Paul Redmond
And fast rule, that's, that's where I would want to operate.
- [18:37]
David Major
You know what I mean?
- [18:39]
Oleg Kalugin
There aren't rules, though. They're practicalities. It's not a rule. There are things you can and can't do. You know, for example, you know, how much time do you have? What is your. If you believe that, what's your basis of that? You know, there's not rules, there's just, excuse me, common sense. And I can still operate outside the common sense rules, but some things just don't work. But I'll give an example. If he's a false defector, how did they meet him when he came here? How did they make contact with them? No, they're not going to take him and have him act as a handler. He's a unknown agent in place. Not going to compromise him. That's right. They're not going to do that.
- [19:26]
Paul Redmond
By unknown agent, David meant that Ames had only just met with the Soviets in April, only really begun working for them in June. He was a brand new asset. And he reiterated there was no way the Soviets could have known that Ames would be the one to pick Yurchenko up or the one to debrief him. But let's pretend for a second they could somehow assure that Ames would be on the case. It still doesn't make sense. Ames walked in in April, the Russians rejected him twice, thinking he might be a dangle. In June, he handed over every name of every Soviet asset the SE Division was running. So it was soon clear they could trust the intel he was giving them. But could they trust him? And I don't mean like could they trust that he wasn't a dangle? Clearly, given the level of intel he handed over, he was a legitimate traitor to the US What I mean is I could they trust him as a person?
- [20:21]
David Major
He was a wild card.
- [20:22]
Paul Redmond
He was obviously an opportunist. What if someone else were to offer him more money? Why would they trust this man just three months after they began working with him to run their highest level dangle of all time? And maybe more importantly, why would they do that knowing he was leaving for.
- [20:41]
David Major
Italy a few weeks after the debrief started?
- [20:44]
Paul Redmond
Why would Vitaly stay for two months after Ames left the case? Why take that risk? I touched base with Paul Redmond on this issue. When I first spoke with him, Paul believed Yurchenko was a dangle, that he was sent. I wondered if this particular detail, that Yurchenko stayed two months after Ames left for language training, if it had ever made him rethink things.
- [21:12]
Julie Cohn
Yeah, that's the big hole in my argument, which I neglected to mention to you, which I think I've told you before. That's the big hole in my argument that were he sent and he couldn't. First of all, David Major says they'd never send anybody into our hands, which is not unreasonable. But my One hype, one possible rebuttal to that is they had aims, but the hole in that is they didn't have aims for very long.
- [21:46]
Paul Redmond
Right?
- [21:46]
Julie Cohn
Okay, I realized that always the water.
- [21:52]
David Major
Was dripping from the seams of the plant theory. But what about the legitimate defector hypothesis? What's crazy here is that in addition to testing those seams, I started to find more and more questions that I hadn't thought of until now, new angles I hadn't considered, and even new Intel. Netcredit is here to say yes to a personal loan or line of credit when other lenders say no, apply in minutes and get a decision as soon as the same day. Loans offered by NetCredit or lending partner banks and serviced by NetCredit applications subject.
- [22:22]
Paul Redmond
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- [22:23]
David Major
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- [22:26]
Julie Cohn
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- [22:44]
David Major
I hate but love but hate but mostly love that I had this under my nose the whole time. I'm talking about small details, little questions that, as I keep adding them to the scales, start to make them tip. 1. Telling the truth okay, so sure, people.
- [23:03]
Paul Redmond
Can debate back and forth whether the intelligence that Yurchenko provided was chicken feed, but Mike Rochford pointed out something pretty critical about that whole debate.
- [23:12]
Mike Rochford
He never lied. Okay, that's important. We never caught him in a lie. Even today, I couldn't tell you he ever lied to us. Which that's important.
- [23:25]
Paul Redmond
The intel Yurchenko provided was combed over in detail, especially after he defected, to look for any potential red herrings in it somewhere. And there weren't any. So if Yurchenko was a disinformation officer, why didn't he ever disinform? You could argue that he was used to misdirect us, to distract the CIA successfully, sure. But he never actually provided any false information, which is not typical. This might not be on its own enough to tip the scale fully, but viewed holistically as a mosaic, this is a very important tile.
- [24:05]
David Major
2 the kidnap and torture lie wasn't for us. It was for the citizens of the Soviet Union. And that sort of changes the way that I view it. Here's John Cipher with a little bit of background.
- [24:19]
John Cipher
They grew from the Czechist past where, you know, they're the founders of the Soviet state were essentially deep underground terrorists who, when they created this state, they built this powerful security service whose only job was to keep the leadership in power at all costs. So they just. They made any opposition group illegal. They destroyed them. They destroyed any possible threats to the leadership. And so they use that security service in the beginning to be their main weapon against enemies abroad. And essentially it's actually more powerful internally and domestically to keep the leadership in power at all.
- [24:55]
David Major
Here's Oleg Kalugin again. The KGB general who hates Putin and now lives in the US Double agents.
- [25:02]
John Cipher
Would not be people who publicly defected, because that would be hard to explain and justify to the people inside the.
- [25:13]
Julie Cohn
KGB or some political situation.
- [25:16]
Oleg Kalugin
How come you know, so, no.
- [25:21]
John Cipher
No way.
- [25:23]
David Major
No. The KGB never used KGB officers for defection. That was just simply unacceptable. The very idea, you know, the base of the Communist Party and the kgb. Second. Next.
- [25:40]
Julie Cohn
No, this would undermine the fate of.
- [25:43]
David Major
The Russian people in their government and their establishment. You know, Yurchenko's redefection was convenient for internal propaganda reasons. First, it meant that Kryuchkov, the head of foreign intelligence at the kgb, wouldn't have Yurchenko's defection hanging around his neck like an albatross, threatening to ruin his chances of promotion. And second, it was a great opportunity to shore up the belief in the power of the Soviet Union and the kgb. It would help them plaster over any doubts in the minds of the Soviet people about the strength of the KGB, which Yurchenko's original defection might have caused. 3. Only people on the outside.
- [26:25]
Paul Redmond
Really, really important. I went through all my interviews and separated into two columns. Those who were sure he was real versus those who thought he was sent. Those who thought he was a plant had never spent any time with him. They were all, when I inspected carefully, people one step removed from his case. The press, for instance, thought he was fake. But to be fair, given the information they had, it would have been weird for them not to think that. All they knew was that he came and then he left and was welcomed back home as a hero. All the intel I've told you about, all the other reasons Yurchenko had wanted to redefect, having to testify in court, leaving his wife and children behind, thinking he was dying of stomach cancer, only to discover he was fine. All of that was classified for decades. Even Paul Redmond was one step removed. Although he oversaw the team that dealt with Yurchenko, he told me that he never once actually met the man himself. He laughingly also told me that Sandy Grimes and Jean Verdefey were so sure that Yurchenko was a real defector that they thought Paul should be institutionalized for thinking that he wasn't. Meanwhile, every single individual who knew Yurchenko personally, each one was absolutely certain, without a doubt, that he was real.
- [27:46]
David Major
Do you think Vital Yurchenko was a plant?
- [27:48]
Mike Rochford
No, no, no. I'm 100% sure he wasn't. 100%.
- [27:52]
David Major
Reid Brose.
- [27:53]
Julie Cohn
He was a true deal. He came back.
- [27:56]
David Major
He wasn't anybody's plant.
- [27:57]
John Cipher
He came on his own.
- [28:00]
Julie Cohn
I'm definite about that.
- [28:01]
David Major
Colin Thompson. There were lots of opinions and a lot of opinions, oh, he was a false defector.
- [28:08]
Mike Rochford
You know, baloney.
- [28:09]
John Cipher
You know, I sat with that guy for three months.
- [28:11]
David Major
No, no. In fact, John Cipher remembers that, for the most part, almost everyone who worked on the Russia desk at the CIA felt Yurchenko was the real deal.
- [28:21]
John Cipher
But the general view, I don't ever remember a serious view inside that it was fake, that it was not true. Obviously, in the counterintelligence world, you're always going to be looking to say, okay, is there something that the Russians would be trying to pass with us to. To deceive us, to make us think the wrong thing, or to, you know, they're trying to protect something, or there's a. There's a reason for it to create a false narrative that takes us down the wrong road. The general view was that he was a legitimate defector who went back.
- [28:57]
David Major
Here's David Major again on why all this is so significant.
- [29:02]
Oleg Kalugin
Let me tell you something. The farther you get away from this, the more it is to believe these grand conspiracies. Running a deception like that is very difficult to do. And if you're close to it and you know the people, the probability of doing it is very, very small. But if you're far away from it, you can sit and criticize. Congress does that all the time. These people in Congress who know nothing about this business but will sit and judgment on doing it. Unfortunately, it's probably true with everything that the closer you are to it, it's not because you're. You buy into it. I had no reason to buy into whether he's sent or not. But I do have a professional responsibility to make a good judgment based on something, not just my feelings. And. And if you do that, the closer you. The more you know about something, the more you realize this guy could not have been sent. Couldn't have been four.
- [29:54]
David Major
The demotion. There are seven of these, by the way. We're almost there. This one's A pretty straightforward one. If Yurchenko was a genius disinformation officer, why did his career stall out when he returned? Prologue was the codename of one of the two successful deception officers. He had been given a huge promotion when he returned after having fooled the CIA for so long. By contrast, after his welcome home fanfare, Yurchenko received a demotion at the KGB before moving on to become head of security at a bank, which just doesn't scream National Hero. 5. Ed Joyce. Okay. Years before he defected, as you guys know, Yurchenko worked at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. And if you remember, during that time, he'd become very close friends with the FBI liaison Ed Joyce.
- [30:46]
Oleg Kalugin
Ed Joyce, you know, told me how.
- [30:49]
John Cipher
Yudchenko seemed to admire America.
- [30:54]
Oleg Kalugin
He was impressed by the restaurants that they went to and things like that. He clearly thought a lot highly of.
- [31:04]
John Cipher
America and would, in fact, complain about.
- [31:06]
Oleg Kalugin
Russia, about the Soviet Union, would complain about conditions.
- [31:12]
David Major
Unfortunately, Joyce passed away, but because Kessler had met with him at length, I dug a little deeper. And the more I learned about their friendship and the things Yurchenko shared with him, the more implausible it made. The plant theory. Early on, Yurchenko started to question what the KGB had told him about America. At one of their lunches together, apparently Yurchenko was counting people in the restaurant, and he shook his head and he's like, I don't get it. Why would they have told me that? I mean, 30% of this restaurant is black. And Yurchenko basically tells Joyce that in his training, the KGB told him that black Americans didn't have anything, that they weren't allowed to have money or go to nice restaurants or anything. Yurchenko looked at Joyce and said, why would they tell me that, knowing I would find out in minutes that it was a lie? Most surprising to me was that Joyce told Kessler that when Yurchenko was finally allowed back to Moscow on home leave, Joyce had asked him about it. I'll read Joyce's recollections as transcribed by Kessler. It must be very difficult for you when you go home. I'm not going to pretend to know anything about your country, because I don't. But certainly it's a pretty closed society with an awful lot of anti American propaganda. From what you've told me, your people believe the same things you believed when you came here. Now you have to go back and hear rude lies. How the hell do you stand in a group and not say, that's not so? But if you do, people will say, who is this guy Yurchenko said it was the toughest thing he had to do every year. Go home and eat with relatives and friends and listen to them say things that simply were not true. I just don't respond, he said sadly. Yurchenko had returned from his first tour in August of 1980, meaning all these comments to Joyce happened between five to ten years before his redefection. So if Yurchenko was a con man, this was an extra, extremely long, very elaborate, Oscar winning con. 6. New Russian intel I reached out to a Russian journalist and translator to do a deeper dive on whether there was anything in Russian media that might give any additional info about this case. The journalist found an article from 2018. In it, the writer interviews former KGB officer General Yuri Kobyakov, who had worked with Yurchenko leading up to his defection, and who was the man in charge of debriefing and interrogating Yurchenko after his arrival back in Moscow. But this interview is gold, and this is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. These small pieces of intel which added to those scales really change things. Here he is remembering what it was like at the KGB when Yurchenko returned. I myself at the time thought that Krychkov was perfectly aware that Yurchenko was a traitor, but decided that the humanism toward him could incentivize other traitors to follow his example and return to the Soviet Union. However, I think this consideration is unfounded. The truth was exposed to me only eight years later. In 1993 came the arrest of Aldrich Ames. Yurchenko managed to evade a prison term precisely because of the effort of the first main Director of the KGB about the secrecy and safety of Ames, who was captured by the Americans and is now serving time in prison. In other words, Yurchenko wasn't a plant sent to distract people from Ames. But the KGB used his redefection to do just that. They made lemonade out of the Yurchenko. Lemon. General Kobukov goes on to describe activities that the KGB undertook after Yurchenko defected. Basically, before the KGB had any inkling Yurchenko might redefect, they had started to react to his departure as though he was a traitor. It must be said that most of my experienced colleagues almost immediately perceived Yurchenko's disappearance as treason. True, some of his former subordinates from foreign counterintelligence started collecting signatures for a petition to protect his reputation in the heat of the moment. And of course an accident or even kidnapping was considered, but the main one was treason. Soon the Fifth department opened a case against its former boss and gave him the nickname Holy fool. He continues, the KGB investigative department opened a criminal case under Article 64 of the Criminal Code, Treason. About two weeks after Yurchenko's disappearance, an investigator called me on the emergency line and invited me to a conversation, quote, unquote, in Lefertovo. It's a prison. Investigator P, a calm, pleasant looking man, started by saying that we needed to talk about something, that he wanted to find out my opinions, etc. From the interrogation, I got the impression that the KGB leadership, first and foremost the first deputy chairman of the KGB, were showing exceptional interest in this case. Kobiakov goes on to say that he noticed some weird stuff a few days before he went to Rome. Yurchenko, who ostensibly was going there to interview an American volunteering to spy for the Soviets, had locked himself in his office. When Kobiakov knocked and was let in, he saw a small piece of paper with tiny handwriting on it, folded up as if to fit in the palm of someone's hand, sitting on Yurchenko's desk. At the time, Kobukov scoffed that Yurchenko would need cheat notes in order to remember the details of the American's case. But in retrospect, he thought maybe Yurchenko was writing down all the stuff he wanted to remember to tell the Americans. Either way, it's weird. Kobikov told this to Investigator P, who agreed with him that it was shady. If Yurchenko was a brilliant plant, and if the KGB knew the plan was for him to claim he had been kidnapped, then why would they have gone to the trouble of opening a criminal investigation? Oh, there's also something kind of tiny, actually. Kobukov mentions it in passing, but it's about the fact that Vitaly Yurchenko did have cash on him when he showed up at the Soviet embassy the day of his redefection. There are only a few other people on earth, basically, besides you and me. Now, who would even realize what this meant? Dan, Colin, and John. And yes, I called them, and yes, they were very interested to hear this, so I'll read it to you. While fleeing from the Americans, Yurchenko took a large sum of money, $4,000, from a CIA safe house, which was large at that time, but did not think to hand over his trophy to the embassy or the residency cash desk, as was customary at the time. Moreover, he didn't hide them and exchanged some of them at the embassy cash desk for finished or bank currency certificates, which were in circulation at the time. No I don't know how to say that. Whatever. One of the deputy chiefs of the PGU sarcastically remarked that in this way he had paid himself three months travel expenses. So Colin might have been right after all. Or at least. Or at least we could finally account for $4,000 of the money that Colin couldn't find anywhere after Yurchenko's departure. The question was, where was the other 16,000? We'll never know for sure about Tom Hanna, but God, was it compelling to finally read something that gave me a sense, something that gave us a clue. I had to share it. Okay. In the end, General Kobyakov says that I got the impression that his escape to the United States was in fact an attempt at virtual suicide. Most defectors betray their homeland out of a desire to improve their living conditions by selling state secrets are to avoid responsibility for a crime they have committed. Yurchenko did not want to improve his life. He wanted to end it and start a new one with his beloved. The situation was reminiscent of the plot of Leo Tolstoy's famous play the Living Corpse, where the main character, Fediya Protasov, staged a suicide in order to leave his family for the gypsy he fell in love with. But then the gypsy rejected Yurchenko. Seven the words of others. As we mentioned earlier, Milt Bearden, who's been in touch with former KGB officers, wrote that Yurchenko is uniformly despised as a traitor by his former KGB colleagues, some of whom believe that, quote, at an appropriate moment, justice will be meted out to the traitor Yurchenko somewhere along the Moscow River. And even more condemning were the comments about Yurchenko made by Soviet defectors. Remember Tickle Oleg Gordievsky, the guy in London who disappeared earlier on in the Year of the Spy and was one of the few to escape the death sentence? According to Ole Gordievsky, the idea that Yurchenko was sent to protect Ames is total nonsense. The KGB would never have let Yurchenko ruin the information that he did in order to protect someone like Ames, who at that point was in no serious danger. And it wasn't just one defector who said that. Here's the real kicker. The thing that really sealed my confidence in my conclusions about Yurchenko being a real defector. The last tiny detail that sort of tipped that scale for me completely. Two of the American intelligence officers I had interviewed continued working in Soviet and then Russian counterintelligence for years. One of those guys was Mike Rochford. Did any of the. Because you got to debrief a lot of other defectors. Did you ever ask other people about, like, what wound up happening to him.
- [40:38]
Mike Rochford
Every one of them?
- [40:40]
David Major
So what wound up happening to him.
- [40:41]
Mike Rochford
Every one of them? Well, I mean, you know, they all said the same thing, you know, that he became this security guard for somebody in the Duma or whatever it was, and was retired. At first he was just put in a corner of the kgb. Still active KGB officer, but inactive because he was just there. People go past his office and laugh and say, that's where he's sitting. And they're not going to do anything to him. He's not getting arrested.
- [41:12]
Paul Redmond
David Major did the same thing. He asked every subsequent defector about Yurchenko and got the same answer every time. Every one of the subsequent defectors that David Major or Mike Rochford spoke with said Yurchenko was a real defector who lied in order to come home and whose lies served the KGB leadership at the time. So they put on the charade of believing him. Now, why would these people who denounced the Soviet Union or Russia and had just spilled massive state secrets, why would they have told us about moles in our midst or about Russian interference in the US Election? Why would they go to all those lengths to tell us the truth about Russia, but then choose to uphold this one lie about a supposed deception campaign from 40 years ago? You heard from him earlier in this episode. But as I built up this final chapter and really solidified my conclusions about Yurchenko, I reached out to Paul Redmond. He had been one of the most convincing defenders of the theory that maybe Yurchenko was sent. But after discussing a few more of these arguments together, to my surprise, he agreed that he viewed the case differently now.
- [42:19]
Julie Cohn
Well, my. My opinion, as I said, it's gone back and forth today. I. I tend. I. If I had to bet, I would say he was not sin.
- [42:32]
Paul Redmond
Got it.
- [42:34]
David Major
I think at the.
- [42:35]
Paul Redmond
In the moment and at the time.
- [42:37]
David Major
Just like all of this stuff, it was.
- [42:40]
Paul Redmond
It was more confusing. But since, with the benefit of time and some more information that come. Has come out since.
- [42:46]
Julie Cohn
Since that's always the case. It's the case in life. I mean, you know, things eventually gel a little. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. That I've heard stuff have been told, Paul, there's everybody since you retired or something along the lines that said he was real. So I said, okay, I was wrong. I don't mind saying I was wrong.
- [43:16]
Paul Redmond
Just so you know, I've gone back and forth intensely myself.
- [43:21]
Julie Cohn
As I told you, I've gone back and forth and I finally Burton got very angry with me, sort of in his last days, and he actually called me up and sent me an email saying, I hear you think Yurchenko was bad and we must have. I mean, Burton had a superb memory, much better than mine.
- [43:44]
Paul Redmond
We've spoken about him, but you've never heard from him. Burton Gerber was the head of the SE Division in 1985 and a legend in the clandestine services. He was the guy with the wolf posters on his wall and the high.
- [43:56]
David Major
Bar for his staff.
- [43:57]
Paul Redmond
It was heartwarming for me to hear about the call Paul had gotten. I had been trying to get in touch with Burton for well over a year before he passed away, but he said he had never spoken to the media in his life and wasn't going to start now. He signed off his emails with God bless America exclamation, which made me smile. Anyway, in one of my emails, I told him I had spoken to Paul Redmond, who believes Yurchenko was a plant, and that I was curious if Burton agreed with him. It's fun to know that while he didn't message me back, it seems he may have picked up the phone and called Paul directly.
- [44:29]
Julie Cohn
Anyway, I said, well, I'll tell you right, I went back to him. I'll tell you right now, I said. I said, I've come around to thinking it was probably, almost certainly good, but doesn't make any difference. He was much more of a nuisance, pain in the ass and caused much more trouble than he was worth.
- [44:49]
Paul Redmond
The classic. What Paul also reiterated though, and after these 10 episodes, I think we can all agree here, is that this is.
- [44:59]
David Major
A unique story with a lot of.
- [45:01]
Paul Redmond
Twists and turns that made deciding his veracity, especially at the time, very complicated.
- [45:08]
Julie Cohn
The rural way of life is about.
- [45:10]
John Cipher
Making everyone feel at home.
- [45:11]
Julie Cohn
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- [46:01]
David Major
In the case of Vitaly Yurchenko, it turns out that the question isn't Quite as simple or as binary as was he real or fake from the beginning? Given everything we've learned and everything we've discussed, what makes most sense here is that Vitaly Yurchenko started out as a real defector. And then, for all the reasons we've talked about, rejection from Valentyna, discovering he wasn't dying of cancer, the leaks putting his family's lives in danger, he decided to shoot his shot and redefect. After all, having served on the jury against defectors in the past, he knew better than anyone what to say that would give him the highest chance of survival. At that point, the Soviets capitalized on his redefection for propaganda. They were able to use him for the same purposes as a plant, even though he had started out as a real defector. Here's John Cipher.
- [46:51]
John Cipher
The assumption in the people who worked Russia cases and things is that the Russians had created a sort of deception campaign afterwards to convince us that he was a false defector and that he was treated seriously and came back. But our view generally was of course, that's what they would do. They were stuck with a bad situation. They would have to create some sort of story to try to make the best of it.
- [47:16]
David Major
Cherkashen Rick Ames handler wrote the following in his memoirs, which I think describes this perfectly. The Americans who thought Yurchenko was a real defector were puzzled. Why wasn't he punished when he got home? Perhaps the biggest reason was Ames. Yurchenko's defection may not have been an elaborate operation to protect the KGB's top agent, but his redefection became exactly that. His arrest would have given the game away. Instead, the CIA was confronted with more questions and uncertainties. We could do nothing to protect the agents and operations Yurchenko had betrayed. But the episode as a whole could still turn at least a little in our favor. And it did. The redefection dragged the CIA's reputation through the dirt. It made a mockery of US intelligence just weeks before a highly anticipated summit between Reagan and Gorbachev. It was a sucker punch in a way. The KGB probably couldn't have planned it better if they tried. But on top of that, it was also an operational coup, flooding the three letter agencies, CIA, nsa, FBI with information and double fact checking. All of which successfully distracted attention away from the goose that lay the golden eggs, Aldrich Ames and his FBI counterpart at the time, Robert Hansen, who were both able to operate undetected for years. That was the result of Yurchenko's actions. But the reason I love this twisted story is that all of it was a far cry from Vitaly Archenko's original intent. And that what makes this story so confusing, so maddening and so human, all of us, every one of us, has our own secrets. Rarely are we our whole entire selves in every room we step into. We all on some level code switch. We're different around our parents than we are around our colleagues or our best friends or the people we're dating. I grew up speaking two languages at home, and I find, like I'm sure many of you do, that my mannerisms are completely different in one language versus another. My parents are divorced, and even as an adult, navigating that has involved silently editing parts of the stories I tell, one parent versus the other. I think maybe because we all know what it is to be multifaceted and to keep certain facets hidden, we're all intrigued on some level by how much or how little we might be seeing in the people around us. And that's not necessarily a bad thing in its most romantic sense. Wanting to discover all the honeycombed chambers of a person, being hungry to see everything, and wanting to be fully seen. That's how I personally would describe love. At its least romantic though, honeycombing can slide into deceit. And every one of us has also at some point told a lie. We all know the feeling of letting someone see only what we want them to see. We all simultaneously want to have some control over how we're perceived, like cleaning the house before a guest arrives, or putting on a brave face in tough times. But at the same time, we all question, worry even about how much others are controlling our perceptions of them. What are they like behind closed doors? Is he always this nice? This is also basically espionage in a nutshell. It's the job of a spy and of a spy catcher only on steroids in our regular lives, when we're trying to suss out, say, whether a person is telling the truth or not. Typically, no one's life is in the balance. Like in a worst case scenario, you might have put your trust in someone and they betrayed you, or they loved someone else, or someone you thought was a friend was using you for money or gain. And each one of those is a shattering, awful feeling. But imagine a world where all the people around you are highly trained to purposely deceive you on a level of sophistication that involves literal masks and sleight of hand and thousand person organizations helping to build a true looking lie. And if you're wrong, it's a bomb that goes off. It's a tyrant who takes power, or a million dollar military secret that's stolen. Or it's a friend of yours, like Polyakov, who, because of your error in judgment, is tortured and murdered. In honing a gut sense for the truth, the counterintelligence officer has to walk a very fine line. In a very high stakes game, assuming that everything is a deception might seem like a safe bet. But do that and you lose the game, because then you assume every truth is a lie. You turn away the defector who's real. You dismiss their warning, say, of an impending attack. At the same time, though, be too trusting, and you also lose the game. Right from the start, you're a dupe. To walk that line between trust and suspicion, it's a delicate balance of intuition and doubt. And of course, doubt your intuition. And there, too, game over. Your compass starts spinning. In describing the world of espionage, James Angleton, the famous and infamously paranoid, decades long CIA head of counterintelligence, once used the phrase a wilderness of mirrors. It's a line lifted from a T.S. eliot poem, and it kind of summarizes the most fascinating thing to me about spy stories. Too much trust or too much doubt, and you plunge into a wilderness where everything is also its opposite, and you can't tell north from south, truth from lie, or friend from foe. While researching this podcast, I started to feel myself descending into a land of mirrors. I began wandering through a maze, bumping into walls, walking down mirrored hallways. At first, given the facts at my disposal, I thought Yurchenko was a real defector. And then I met with Paul. And suddenly I was thrown. This was a man who had an incredible pedigree. He was the guy who had caught Aldrich Ames, for God's sakes. And he's telling me he believes Yurchenko is a plant. And somehow, as I leafed back through my research, every single thing I thought proved that Yurchenko was the real deal also could be proof of the opposite. I remember I couldn't sleep after my first meeting with Paul. I felt for the first time the sudden shock that maybe I thought I had been staring at one thing, when in reality, I'd been mistaking it for its mirror image this whole time. How was it that every fact actually now looked like a clever deception? And this was precisely the James Bondi version of the things we all struggle with in our daily lives. The powerful way perception can disguise itself as truth. The way it's easy to believe what we want and hard to realize when we've been wrong. Now more than ever, as so many politicians keep trying to convince us that truth is hearsay and hearsay is truth, I really felt my compass spinning. I mean, I took you guys right along with me. You saw. You saw it spin. I wish I could know what each of you thought along the way. Has your gut been tested? Have you felt your opinion swivel? Luckily, I was able to keep gathering intel. I thought we'd be lucky to get a few CAA officers on record. But after speaking to over eight of them and to three special FBI agents, to reporters who covered the story, real time, to historians, and even to the KGB general whom Yurchenko used to work for, a bigger picture began to appear. It's a real gift to be able to be observing this with a distance of time, with the benefit of the full story, of knowing the fact that the Soviet Union was slowly rotting from the inside and that Yurchenko's and others knew it was failing before we did. Of knowing the secret backdrop of the mega betrayal of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanson. Given the grace of time, enough people have given me enough details that I've been able to cross reference, analyze, and finally find enough touch points in this wilderness to tell truth from its twisted reflection. Though Vitaly Yurchenko had seemed a double agent from the outside, when I finally got close enough and far enough away, I suppose I could see he was a real defector who took a leap of faith right at the feet of, ironically, his mirror image, Rick Ames, who had taken his own leap of faith in the opposite direction. One country's traitor in a wilderness of mirrors is another man's hero. Spy stories, in some ways, are like Greek drama. There's something exhilarating in seeing our own human foibles projected in mythic proportion. It's the thrill of watching people walk that fine line of trust and doubt that we all walk every day, only on a high wire. All of this is why Vitaly Yurchenko's story is truly unique among spy dramas. It's one where, even to the most seasoned counterintelligence officers, the line was very hard for people to walk. And the reason, I think, is because of just how much chance was involved. In a world where people are thinking in terms of chess or even checkers, Yurchenko's was more like a game of backgammon. He was playing one game, and then things didn't pan out. So he rerolled the dice at the top of his next turn to an opponent who isn't expecting dice at all. Who's expecting a game of pure strategy that can throw a wrench in all the traditional ways that people try to determine truth from lies, be they counterintelligence, greats, journalists, or even mean you? And in Yurchenko's case, the wrench, which is my favorite part about this story, was love. My friend Anna once told me a saying that I really like, that people are legible but not always predictable. And that's because of the variable of human emotion, love in particular. Deeply understandable and completely irrational. Vitaly Yurchenko's intent had been to leave a broken marriage and a country he was disillusioned with, to head to a place where he could be free, valued as a prized defector with a woman he loved. His intent was to have the guts to take a leap and enjoy what he thought were his last months on Earth, to stage a suicide and run off with his gypsy. Then when that failed, and worse, when his actions to pursue Valentina became a threat to his children's lives, he rerolled. For the love of family, probably in all of this was a heavy dose of, let's call it love of self or, or some amount of selfishness or delusions of grandeur maybe. But it wasn't logical, it wasn't predictable. It was human. Vitaly Yurchenko was a flawed, imperfect man whose basic need to love and be loved wound up squeezing him in the crack between the superpowers of a bipolar world. The Redefector is a production of Waveland. I'm Julie Cohn and I wrote and created the series. Jason Hoak is the executive producer and he also produced and edited the series. Shane Freeman is our sound engineer. Additional production assistance provided by Leo Culp. Music by Robert Ellis. If you love the series, please make sure to leave a review and to tell a friend. Follow Waveland on Instagram at Waveland Media for more information on this series and more. Thanks for listening.
- [59:31]
Paul Redmond
That sound is the leaky shower head that came with your rental. The one that has you starting every morning with a low pressure nightmare that's nearly your age. Stop settling for someone else's shower.
- [59:45]
David Major
Consider this your wake up call to swap it for the relaxing feel of a Moen shower head and see how.
- [59:50]
Paul Redmond
One easy change changes everything. Water designs our life. Who designs for water?
- [59:58]
Julie Cohn
Moen McCrispy strips are now at McDonald's. Tender, juicy and its own sauce. Would you look at that? Well, you can't see it, but trust me, it looks delicious. New McCrispy strips now at McDonald's.