← The Redefector
The Redefector
In Search of a Spy | Chapter 9
00:39:17
The modern day hunt for Vitaly Yurchenko, the 90 year-old spy.
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Julie Cohn
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Waveland like all things in the Quest for the Truth in the Vitaly Archenko Story When Aldrich Ames was arrested in 1994, the news that the biggest CIA traitor of all time had been Vitale's lead CIA debriefer seemed to create more questions than answers. Some said Ames betrayal was proof that Vitaly Yurchenko was a plant. In fact, he was the reason Vitaly had been planted in the first place. Their theory was that Vitaly Yurchenko had been sent to distract the intelligence community to protect Ames. The FBI had its own massive traitor at the same time, this guy Robert Hanssen, which only compounded this theory. Yurchenko was sent to shield the Soviets two golden assets by redirecting the CIA and the FBI toward other lesser moles. And as for the argument that the Soviets never sent high level defectors, well, this theory went, they knew their defector was going to be debriefed by a Soviet agent. They wouldn't have had to worry about truth serum at all. On the other hand, there were those who were sure the aims of it all was proof Vitaly had been a real defector, doomed from the start. The Soviets had no way of knowing with absolute certainty that Rick Ames would have been assigned to debrief Yurchenko. They wouldn't have sent the fifth highest ranked man in the entire KGB on a maybe. Instead, this theory went, this real defector had been greeted at the airport on day one by a Soviet agent and he had gone ahead and poured his heart out to the guy. Of course, Valentina had rejected Vitaly. The KGB knew all about his plans to run away with her and took sure steps to intervene instead of definitely answering any questions. It was as If Ames arrest and that bombshell of information had simply added fuel to the debate that had begun raging back in 1985 when Yurchenko had redefected back to Moscow. And that debate is still ongoing today. In fact, when I first got interested in this story a few years ago, Vitaly Yurchenko's Wikipedia page left the question wide open. It said, Vitaly Yurchenko is a former high ranking KGB officer in the Soviet Union. After 25 years of service in the KGB, he defected to the United States during an assignment in Rome. Okay, then it says, quote, although it is unclear whether his initial defection was legitimate, Yurchenko was awarded the Order of the Red Star from the Soviet government for the successful infiltration operation. And that page had been unchanged for years. But then all of a sudden in 2022, I had to do a double take. I went to look up the Cyrillic spelling of Yurchenko's name and that is when I happened to notice a pretty huge change in Yurchenko's English Wikipedia page. Here's what it now Vitaly Sergeyevich Yurchenko is a former high ranking KGB disinformation officer in the Soviet Union. Okay, then it says, after falsely providing the names of two US intelligence officers as KGB agents and claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald was never recruited by the kgb, Yurchenko slipped from the Americans and returned to the Soviets. It is clear that his initial defection was illegitimate because Yurchenko was awarded the Order of the Red Star from the Soviet government for the successful infiltration operation. I read it and I was so shocked. I remember reading it again and thinking, what? Wikipedia has this thing where you can view edit history. And so I looked into exactly when this change was made. Weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. Somebody wanted to be changing the narrative all of a sudden. Make Yurchenko seem definitively a heroic high ranking KGB disinformation officer rather than a maybe defector. It was all pretty cloak and dagger. So was there a reason that, say, the Russian government would be keen to change the narrative on this 40 year old story so as to officially call Yurchenko a successful plant from the very beginning? I have no idea. But following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which happened just after these changes were made, more than 300,000 Russian citizens and residents are estimated to have left Russia by just one month later in mid March. Was there any possible way the Russian government could have seen that coming? If so, maybe it was important to change the Yurchenko story lest he give anyone any ideas. Or maybe Yurchenko really had been a disinformation officer and now suddenly acknowledging it publicly was urgently helpful because it might help Russia combat a new and growing deficienc problem. One thing I do know is that all of a sudden, after decades, this story was getting new attention. And not just for me, as is so often the case with the Vitaly Yurchenko story. It was all very confusing and all I had was theories. I wanted answers from Waveland. I'm Julie Cohn and this is the Redefector. This is chapter nine, In Search of a Spy. I wanted to know if Yurchenko was alive. What had happened to him since his redefection. Was he in prison? Had he been executed? Was he alive and well? Did he have a fancy job? Or had he been put out to pasture? After a lot of digging, I found out some significant information about Yurchenko's fate after his redefection. Although the trail of intel went dry around 2011, after his press conference in Washington, he flew home, as you know, to much fanfare. He gave a second press conference shortly after landing, where he lambasted the CIA even more and doubled down on his torture story. Then he disappeared for months until In March of 1986, NPR ran a story that said he had been executed and that his family had been billed for the bullets. A Soviet spokesperson responded to say that was nonsense and that he was alive and well. But without proof, the rumors kept swirling. Suddenly and by complete happenstance, Yurchenko appeared on a German TV show. In April, a German reporter accidentally bumped into Yurchenko while in Moscow where he just happened to be standing around with his film crew. Yurchenko conveniently explained to the reporter that he he had dropped out of sight to receive unspecified medical treatment, but was not dead as had been reported in the West. He said he was planning to write about his experience in a book and recently returned to his old KGB job as a security officer for Soviet embassies abroad. Sequestered away getting medical treatment didn't exactly sound like promoted and basking in the glory of being a hero. It sounded more like is getting grilled in a basement somewhere. But it's hard to say. And I wouldn't exactly call it the smoking gun, though based on my research and after hiring two different Russian speaking researchers to help me, I can say that book he was working on was never published. Then Yurchenko disappears from view until about 1992 when an American writer whom you've heard from already, Ronald Kessler, became the only American journalist to have spoken to Yurchenko since His redefection, he was able to get in touch with Yurchenko via something called Poste Restant. Post Restante is where you send a letter to a post office, not a person's address, and it just waits or rests there until the person comes to the post office to retrieve it. Kessler and I spoke about his experience traveling to meet Yurchenko. From the moment he landed, Kessler was under constant surveillance. The revelations from that interview were disappointing to say the least. Yurchenko made up a bunch of nonsense, nonsense that Kessler was easily able to fact check when he got home. And otherwise he toed the party line. Over two days, I spent 14 hours with him interviewing Yurchenko. And of course he was very cagey and still claimed that he was had been drugged by the CIA and was not a defector. That was the storyline that he came up with. Vitaly did what Vitaly had done so well years before at his press conferences. He lied through his teeth. But that constant and oppressive KGB surveillance around the entire interview, that extremely short leash, it also didn't scream disinformation hero. But then again, it also wasn't exactly proof. Either way, it's possible no one was given a long leash in those days. The last shred of evidence I could find about Yurchenko I found in a Russian news article from December of 2011. That week, a large number of personal documents about a prominent Moscow bank's clients had somehow found their way to the street. Like there had been some kind of a breach or incident. And for some reason there were private documents littering the sidewalk. A journalist interviewed the head of security, none other than Vitaly Yurchenko. She asked Yurchenko how this snafu had come to pass and whether he thought it was a violation of the bank client's privacy. Here's what he why are you so concerned over this anyway? Why are you focused on this issue? Tell me your editor's number. I will call him and speak with him. What, you don't have any other topics to write about? There aren't any other problems. This did sound like classic Fatali. And it corroborated some information I had heard from several of my interviewees who'd heard he'd gone on eventually to work for a bank in Moscow. It was also an interesting clue. Yurchenko's job a couple decades after, in theory being one of the most sophisticated and public disinformation geniuses of the kgb, was to work as head of security at a local bank. That also was not screaming national Hero Prologue was the codename of a successful KGB double agent of the 1980s, in contrast to Yurchenko. After Prologue had successfully fooled the Americans, he'd been given a giant promotion at work and stayed at the KGB for many years until his retirement. This was all curious, but nothing definitive. Maybe head of a private bank was a bigger deal than I understood. I do know he was allowed to remain alive when he got back for at least 25 years, but that is where the trail ran dry. As of 2011, he was living and working in Moscow, and the last he had spoken about his case publicly was the 90s, where he had clung to the old narrative. Given the Wikipedia change, I wondered, if he was still alive now, which story would he be telling today? The kidnap story or the brilliant disinformation version? Poste restaurant worked for Kessler, so I tried it myself. I wrote Yurchenko letters. Post restant to Moscow and to Kaluga, where he was rumored to be living in his retirement. And then I waited and waited. I checked my PO box so frequently that I'm on a first name basis at the shipping store. Hey. Hi, Julie. Any news from the PO Box? Nope, no news yet. All right. Thank you, Jerry. You're welcome. But since Yurchenko's lie correlated then with the Russian party line, it could be just as helpful for me to know whether the official Russian stance on his story had changed today. Is this Wikipedia disinformation officer the new party line? First, I figured I'd try and call the Russian embassy in D.C. which seemed straightforward enough, though, remember, this was after the war in Ukraine had begun and relations with Russia had gotten icier. Hi there. My name is Julie Cohn. Can you hear me? This is the Energy Embassy line for Russian people. What question? I'm calling from the press. Ok, Please write down the phone number. We're sorry, you have reached a number. Calling the embassy surprisingly didn't work. So I tried calling the Russian consulate in New York. The service you're attempting to use has been restricted or is unavailable. I started to try Russian consulates and embassies in other cities, and even the Russian spokesperson of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Never have I been hung up on so many times or seen so many consulate numbers that rang. No answer. Not even a voicemail or that were disconnected entirely. The official route wasn't working. Then I hit on a possible new lead. I discovered a very primitive website. It looked like it had been created in 1999 and then never updated. That claimed to be a digital phone book, and in it I found the numbers for nine people with Vitaly Yurchenko's name and patronymic initial. Unlike the databases I was using in the US This Russian site didn't provide much info about these Vitales, like their ages or anything. But I was determined to call them. It was pretty hard to get a translator for this story, actually. By this point, tensions had risen and the press in Russia was tightly controlled. We'll call the guy who bravely agreed to help me. Nikolai, listen, I've done some. I've done some weird shit. I. I had to pretend to be, like, a suicidal, depressed patient to help train medical doctors. I've, you know, I've worked for some investigative reporting, too, but, like, you know, this has to take the cake because, you know, here we are calling a 90 year old, like, double, you know, agent who defected back, you know, to. To the Soviet Union who's told this bogus story so much that we think he believes it. And we're actually trying to, you know, get him to tell the real story now. He' and, like, you know, two of his friends are in jail. This is. This has got to be the weirdest shit I've ever been involved with. But it's exciting, too, because, you know, who knows? Who knows what? What if he's around and he'll talk? I'm just saying, like, wow. Wow. Amazing. Okay, let's. Let's do it. Let's take. Let's take a shot. Let's take a shot. We went through most of the list with no success. Finally, though, being routed by Google, the cost of this call is 22 cents per minute. A receptionist had answered for something called the Akvalon Company Group, which the Internet says is a software engineering company. She said they didn't have a Vitaly Yurchenko in their directory. And then when Nikolai asked what it was exactly that Aqualon does, she went totally silent. They don't really like snoops, the Russians. Only one other call went through. Hello? Yeah, she hung up on him, too. So she was like. I was like, can I speak to Vitalis Yeagergievich? And she's like, who? And I'm like, vitalis Sergeyevich? She's like, that's the wrong number. Check your number before you call. And I'm like. And I'm like, okay, that's kind of rude, but, I mean, that was 1985. 1985 behavior right there. Just to make sure, we turned over every rock we could. We tried to search for any contact info for his son, Peter Vitalyevich, but found zero matches. That's that. Well, we have done our due diligence. I mean, you can't say we haven't. Absolutely. Before I gave up for good on the Russian angle, I reached out to every source I could think of in the FBI and CIA who might still know someone in Moscow who would know if Vitaly was at least alive or dead. In one case, someone who had been very recently posted in Moscow responded that people had stopped checking in on him decades ago, he was no longer a priority, and no one knew if he was even still alive. In order to look for a death certificate in Russia, if you aren't related to the person in question, it's a little complicated. And if you're a foreigner, you have to provide your passport info, among other things, along with your request. That was not something I felt keen to do. There was one thing, though, that I just couldn't get out of my head, and it was the fact that Peter Vitaly's son wasn't listed at all in Russia. Or at least not on this weird 1999 White Pages site I had found. And I had this thought, and it's the same thought I had when I was looking for Valentina. I knew that many people had emigrated to the US after the fall of the Soviet Union, and in particular, very often the children of Soviet defectors. So I wondered, what if Vitale's kids lived here now in the United States? Summer's here, and with weekend getaways, celebrations and more on your calendar, Nordstrom has everything you need for your best dress season ever. From playful prints and breezy fabrics to 70s inspired looks and bright handbags. Discover new arrivals from your favorite brands like Reformation, Veronica Beard Farm, Rio, Levi's and more. It's easy too, with free shipping and free returns in store order, pickup and more. Plus NordicLub members enjoy free 2 day shipping on thousands of items in select areas. Shop today in stores and@nordstrom.com the new McCrispy strip is here. Dip approved by Ketchup Tangy barbecue, Honey mustard, honey mustard, Sprite, McFlurry, Big Mac sauce, double dipped in buffalo and Ranch More ranch and creamy chili. McCrispy strip dip now at McDonald's. Could Vitaly's son live in America? I mean, sure, Vitaly was pretty hated by the CIA. But then again, the children of some of America's most hated enemies had found their way to the us. Fidel Castro's daughter, Joseph Stalin's daughter. So why not the Yurchenko kids? And then the more I thought of it, the More, I was like, you know what? Yurchenko isn't Stalin. He's not actually an enemy. He had given the CIA a black eye, but was that a crime? In other words, were there any laws actually stopping Vitaly Yurchenko himself from traveling back here, too? It was a crazy, almost ludicrous thought. But if he had been a real defector and then life had sucked in Russia, could he have joined the waves of other people leaving the country after the fall of the Soviet Union, when all of the restrictions relaxed? The last I had heard of Yurchenko in Russia was in 2011. What if he'd come here after that? Here's David Major. You've heard from him in past episodes. He's a longtime FBI agent who briefed President Reagan on intelligence issues during the Year of the Spy, and who has since taught and lectured on intelligence at his CI Center. For the record, David feels certain that Yurchenko was a legitimate defector, not a plant. Is there a version where he can. Like, once the wall falls, could he have left, do you think, back again? I don't think so. I mean, maybe, but no one's going to trust him. He does that. No one's going to trust good in a novel, good in a book, good in a movie, but I don't think no. I want trust him. Would we trust him if he defects and then come redefects back again? Redefects. Redefects. Because he can't. He defected, redefected, and then redefected again. I don't think so. I just don't think. And I think he has to think through. He says, oh, you know, this is not going to go well. I've already made my decision. If he tried to come back in, is there any version where we would turn him away? The KGB officer who's redefecting? Yeah, I've never seen that. They come to us and they say, should we turn him back? No, they wouldn't turn him back. Why would you turn them back? You know, let him in and have discussion with them. Yeah, like, what the heck was that about? What was that all about, son? You know? But if I was running the operation, I wouldn't turn him back. I'd have another shot at him. Okay, well, if he was a real defector, then maybe the rumors were true. Word had it that although publicly, Yurchenko was hailed as a hero, privately, he was hated. Milt Bearden, one of the former heads of Russia House at the CIA, told me he had spoken to an ex KGB guy who had told him that Yurchenko had been stripped of his metals and was told that someday he wouldn't know when or how, but someday he'd find himself at the bottom of the Moscow river where he belonged. If he was a real defector, it's certain that the top brass wasn't buying his kidnap story. Because, remember, Rick Ames was reporting back to the Soviets every secret Yurchenko spilled. Maybe Yurchenko would have wanted to leave because life was so miserable in post Soviet Russia for him. Or at least. At least maybe his kids would have come over for a similar reason. Maybe, given the snafu with the data breach that happened under his watch in 2011, it might even be possible he was fired or something from that bank and then left the country. The more I thought about it, the more Yurchenko's interest in perhaps attempting the unthinkable and coming back to the US Made a modicum of sense. For one thing, when Yurchenko came over, he'd gotten what's called PL1 tend. I'll let Joe Augustin, who, for part of his tenure at the CIA ran the defector Resettlement Program, tell you what that meant. All right. It goes back to PL110, Public Law110, that dates back to, really the 1949 CIA act, where we said, those people who get in trouble, who have provided great security, we will take them in up to 100 people a year. When they come, we resettle them for life. And we have open cases that go back decades. And, you know, in this country, and I'm allowed to tell you this, we probably have, you know, high hundreds of open cases, you know, 600, 700, 800 open cases. These are former spies who are now resettled in the US and as I said, we resettle them for life. We've often been compared to the U.S. marshal Witness Protection Program, but there's a difference with the Witness Protection program, if you sway from the program, if you do things, you can get kicked out of that program. When we take somebody in, we take them for life with all the warts and everything that goes along with that, we take them in, and they become a lifelong charge of enarok and the CIA. If Yurchenko was PL110, would this whole we've got your back forever thing hold true even after he went on national TV dragging the CIA's name through the dirt and then redefecting? Here's Mike Rochford, his FBI handler. Oh, did he get PL110? Yes. I think there's a promise of PL110, I don't think he ever got it yet. I think there was also a promise for a million dollars that he never got. That was there? I mean, the question is, would he get the money with interest? Reid and I had always talked about that. You and Reid always talked about it? Yeah. Like, if he showed up. Well, of course, I found that fascinating. I knew Yurchenko had been promised the million dollar bonus, but everyone I spoke to said he had never actually gotten the money before he left, that there was still some paperwork that needed to be paid, filled out or something that said the CIA is famous for holding on to people's money with interest, sometimes for decades, until the person in question gets out of the gulags or whatever, or their next of kin comes to claim it. This is Joe Augustin again. To your point of like, we keep our promises, is there a version where that money stays waiting for him? I think, if I'm not mistaken, and you may know better than I, I thought that money was contingent upon him staying. Not only staying, but identifying people who had, you know, agents within. Recruited agents within CIA or the FBI or. Or, you know, somebody in the intelligence community. So I might. I don't know that for absolute fact, but I thought it was contingent upon him, the identification, and that never happened. So why would the money be waiting for him? Well, he had identified agents within the CIA, Ed Howard, and nsa, Ronald Pelton. Then again, he also left with both his middle fingers metaphorically lifted over his head. So I couldn't get a definitive answer on whether he was PL100. Tend, maybe not. And if so, whether there would be money waiting for him. Unclear, though unlikely. But then another thought occurred to me. Forget the PL110. What if he didn't try to go through any special channels at all? What if he just walked right in the front door? And if he came over here and was like, you know, I'd love to move here, and just started filing for. In the. In the regular pathways. Would someone have found out? Oh, yeah, they would have. I don't know. I like to think they would, but I don't. Who the hell knows? In today's world, people could have missed stuff. I mean, you know, I began hunting for his kids and for his name in the United States. The search was not easy. Then finally, I hit on something truly bizarre. I found a Peter Yurchenko, whose known relatives included a Vitaly Yurchenko, who's otherwise unlisted. His other top known relatives included someone named Tatiana, which happened to be the name of Vitaly Yurchenko's daughter. They all lived in the same neighborhood, and in fact, all of their names were associated with the same address, which just happened to be located about an hour and a half from where Vitaly Yurchenko's second safe house had been in Virginia. Could Vitaly Yurchenko have come back to the only place he really knew? With a home equity investment? From Hometap, you get access to your home equity in cash without monthly payments to use for whatever you'd like, from paying off debt to making renovations or handling emergency expenses. 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As you guys all know, Alex was Yurchenko's CIA alias during his three month defection. I realized this could all be a coincidence. I mean, given the crazy chutzpah it would take for a guy this hated to waltz back into this country. It actually was likely a coincidence. He was just a lot of coincidences all in one place. Vitaly's name, both of his children's names, a company with his CIA alias, and a location a stone's throw from where he once lived. I'm tending to think it's a coincidence, but I can't not scratch this itch. Yeah, totally. Same. Gotta scratch it. Gotta scratch it. That was one of my best friends in the world, Angenette. I had been visiting her in Virginia to attend the baptism of her son, my godson. And I had told her that to my shock, I had found this house not too far from where she lived, actually. And I really wanted to knock on its doors. I was. I was not expecting her to come, I was more sharing my thoughts. But to my surprise, Angenette decided to take the day off work and hop on board this absurd adventure with me in the car. I tried to catch her up on everything. And also, in theory, Peter Yurchenko owns it. Peter Yurchenko is also the co owner of a trucking company called Alex Transportation, which, as far as I can tell, has no trucks. Yes, well, trucking companies are like notorious mob fronts, aren't they not. They are. And like trafficking, I really don't want to be trafficked today. I'm not wearing the right outfit. Neither one of us was wearing shoes with any arch support. She pointed out we were not wearing good getaway outfits. This whole mob possibility had actually been brought up to me earlier by Mike Rochford. When I told him I thought Yurchenko might be alive and living in the U.S. mike was very skeptical. He also warned me that, yes, ex spies don't want to be found, but the other kind of Russians who don't want their numbers listed and who might run transportation companies, to Angenette's point here, aren't, shall we say, fond of strangers knocking on their doors. He suggested I go with someone who didn't look imposing, but who could step in if things got dicey. Instead, I went with Angenette, who doesn't look imposing and who is also not capable of stepping in, especially not in these shoes. That said, though, there was a bit of a risk, it wasn't really a huge one. We had our location services on, and we checked in with people right before and after with instructions to call the police if they didn't hear from us by a certain time. Anyway, in the car, we began running through the scenarios. Okay, so let's just quick, quick sketch here. Scenario A. It's Vitaly Yurchenko. Yes, but how do we know that it's him? Is. It is an old man. When Vitalyarchenko left, he was 49 years old in 1985. He's all as dirt. I'm a size 88. That's old. That's not old as dirt. Okay? I mean, what's old? What qualifies as old as, like, not that much older than our parents? He's 10 years older. Okay, okay, but like, with everything he's been through, I'm sure he looks old. Af. Yeah, he's not gonna be like. You're not gonna be like, oh, you look like you're 65, Vitaly. I mean, and he's Russian. An old Russian man. He's an old Russian man who's missing the ends of the middle two fingers on his right hand. There have been times while working on this podcast where it's been hard not to laugh at just the absurdity of all of this. The fingers thing is good. I mean, that's helpful. Super helpful. Super helpful. All right. Scenario B was that it was his son Peter, who answered. Scenario C is they're really pleasant. Like, they invite us in for tea, and they're like, we have no idea what you're talking about. Scenario C is the wrong Yurchenko's. Scenario D is they're the wrong Yurchenkos, but they might, you know, maybe be in the mob. And then the last scenario was that no one was home at all, in which case we decided we'd treat ourselves to some consolation milkshakes at a nearby diner. Soon we had arrived. It was a classic American suburb. Beautiful homes, manicured lawns. Yeah, people are. Everyone is working out on their lawn. People care about their homes. Working. It almost looks like we're on, like, a set. Yeah, it looks like Pleasantville. Pleasantville, yeah. We drove through a little roundabout, then down a dead end street, and there, just in the cul de sac, was the house we were looking for. Cul de sacs, by the way, are great places to live if you want to be sure no one is spying on you. We parked, got out of the car, and conspicuously, because every stranger is conspicuous in a cul de sac, walked up to the house. Should I brought my jacket? Do I look weird? You look great. Oh, my leg. What? I just said. You remember that rash that I had? Okay, recording. Oh, sorry. I forgot. We knocked and waited. Nothing. We waited even more. Okay, no one's here. Oh, here. Hi there. How are you? My name is Julie. Isb. Peter, your tank go home, by any chance? I would. Okay. Let me ask my daughter to help me understand. Okay. Okay. Of course. Could I ferry. No, not yet. Really? Oh, okay. And Jeanette asked if it could be. Jeanette Vitaly, Yurchenko's wife at the time he redefected, she would be in her late 80s by now, which this woman was not. But she did appear to be around the same age as Yurchrenko's daughter Tatiana would have been. Hi. Hi. How are you? I'm Julie. I'm Angenette. We're writing and researching about misunderstood figures of the Cold War. A young boy, five maybe, came to stand next to the daughter we were hoping to speak with. If Peter Yurchenko or Tatiana Yurchenko, are here. We're trying to write about a man named Vitaly Yurchenko. You're specifically writing about him? Yeah. Oh, interesting. Why him specifically? Vitali Ochenko? Yeah. I was writing a movie actually, about 1985, and so I started reading about him and I just thought, like, this is crazy. This is crazy. And. Yeah, and I. And I think people misunderstand it. There's a lot of debate still now about, like, I. I think once information came out in the 90s about this guy named Eldridge Ames, it. The story didn't get retold properly. And. Yeah, I don't know. I just wanted to. Oh, well, I mean, none of them are here right now, but I'm thinking maybe you're mistaking this fatality with someone else. Oh, okay. That's what I was like. I'm really confused. What did he do? Is this Vitali, by any chance in his 80s? No. No, no. Okay. It wasn't entirely suspicious that she would say that. The information I had on the Vitale at this address did say that he might be in his 50s, but the search software that I use can often get ages wrong, so we might have the wrong. Okay, yeah, I have an Uncle Vitaly, but he's in his early 50s. But again, that's why I'm like, I don't know anything about him where it's like a story major written. And he wasn't part of any, like, Cold War or any story, politics or. None of us were. So that's why I was like, does anyone named Tatiana Yurchenko live here? She does. She. Well, she used to live here, but again, she is in her early 30s. Oh. Oh, yeah. That's not the vibe. Yeah, that's not. No, it's possible. So we. We were researching this was a location that came up with a lot of the names of the people, all like Tatiana, Vitali, Peter. So that's why Peter was. Was part of the story. So Vitaly Archeno had two children named Tatiana and Peter. And what is the story now? I'm a curious. Okay. So we told her the story, and then we showed her Yurchenko's photo. There is one, our grandpa's brother, Vitality, but that's not his picture. And I don't know anything about him ever going back and forth and like, he lived his life there and still believe is. But. Yeah, I'm sorry. Well, I'm really glad you guys answered the door. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you so much. Okay. That's what it's an amazing story for your family, you know. Yeah. Thank you so, so much for your time. If we find anything, we'll let you know. Thank you. Have a great. Okay. Thanks. Could not have been less threatening. It's a pretty common last name. Yeah, but you had all the names. I know. The daughter had explained that her great grandfather had been executed for a crime he hadn't committed. And his sons and his mother were sent to a work camp for his sins. Eventually, when they were released, none of the rest of the family wanted anything to do with them. Years later, the government sent a letter apologizing for his wrongful death. It was too little, too late. And in the early 2000s, the family had moved to the U.S. these Yurchenko had their own uncomfortable past with the Russian government, but they were not the Yurchenko we were hoping to find. On the plus side, also not the Yurchenkos we were hoping not to find. These people didn't seem, I don't know, mobbed up with fancy cars or any bling. They seemed like they were hoping to start fresh lives here in America without the baggage of oppression from a totalitarian regime. Investigation is as much about the journey as it is about the discoveries. And especially in this world of two faced characters and head spinning plausible conspiracies. I felt so much satisfaction in moving something from the shifting sands of the maybe category onto some firm footing in no, no. Vitaly Yurchenko was not in America. It had been exciting to imagine finally getting to talk to Vital, but it didn't look like I'd be hearing anything from the horse's mouth. The thing is, the more I thought about it, the more I realized, would it even have helped to hear Vitaly's side? Sure, it would have been nice to know if he were alive. But no matter what he told us, if the man was renowned for one thing, it was being untrustworthy. So as I was striking out in Moscow and in a small town in Virginia on my hunt, I became less and less attached to getting a hold of Vitaly himself and more and more compelled to boil the facts I already had. And after years of research and of driving all over this country to pick what felt like anyone's brains who had ever known Vitaly Orchenko, I began to realize that I had actually finally amassed enough info to find the truth on my own. More on that next time. The Redefector is a production of Waveland. I'm Julie Cohn and I wrote and created the series. Jason Hoke 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 wavelandmedia for more information on this series and more. Thanks for listening. This is an ad for Roundup for Lawns. It kills weeds down to the root without harming your lawn. It works on crabgrass, dandelions, clover. It works on weeds with names you can't even pronounce. It's Roundup for Lawns. When used as directed, always read and follow pesticide label directions. Did you know? 39% of teen drivers admit to texting while driving. Even scarier, those who text are more likely to speed and run red lights. Shockingly, 94% know it's dangerous, but do it anyway. As a parent, you can't always be in the car, but you can stay connected to their safety with Greenlight Infinity's driving reports. Monitor their driving habits, see if they're using their phone, speeding and more. 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