David Major (47:16)
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.
