← The Redefector
The Redefector
The Walk-in | Chapter 1
00:38:46
It was August 1st, 1985, a year so full of espionage drama that it has since become known as "The Year of the Spy." The CIA had been suspiciously losing Soviet assets one after another. Just as the Agency was beginning to suspect a leak, around the world in Italy, a KGB Colonel named Vitaly Yurchenko made his way to the American Embassy in Rome, ready to trade Soviet intelligence in exchange for immediate exfiltration to the U.S. The first secret he revealed: The CIA had a mole in its midst. Two secrets he doesn't mention: Yurchenko believes he's dying, and wants to spend his last months reunited with a woman he met while stationed in America.
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- [00:02]
Julie Cohn
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- [01:02]
Julie Cohn
This podcast is intended for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised. My name is Julie Cohn and I could not be more excited to let you in on an insane, insane espionage drama that I've now spent years chasing down. All over the world. I've knocked on doors to try to find a Russian spy in hiding. I've trudged through the snow to meet reclusive retired special FBI agents, spoken to reporters, to historians, to authors, and I've road tripped up and down the east coast to meet with cold warriors I'd been reading about for years. I'm a producer, reporter and screenwriter, and for the past few years I've been writing espionage scripts for film and tv, which has meant consuming more spy material than I ever imagined. And while I was doing research for a different spy project by accident, I came across the story of a Soviet spy named Vitaly Yurchenko, and I could not let it go. The more I pulled on this yarn, the more astonishing the story became. Vitaly Yurchenko's is easily one of the most mind boggling real life espionage stories I've ever come across. Honestly, it has it all. It has moles brought down by their own tragic flaws, forbidden love stories across the Iron Curtain, brave people who risk their lives for a better world, and cowards who sell them out for a paycheck, all with the dizzying stakes of nuclear war. What's more is that this story also happens to contain a mystery. A giant puzzle if you will. One which hasn't been solved, not completely, and one I've become determined to get to the bottom of. Because the only thing I like better than learning the truth. And if you've tuned into the show, I kind of assume that you and I feel the same. The only thing I like better than the truth is the thrill of having to find it myself. From Waveland, I'm Julie Kohn, and this is the Redefector. This is chapter one, the walk in. Let's start at the beginning in 1985, in what has since become known as the Year of the Spy.
- [04:14]
Stephen Engelberg
In the news, a summer of spy stories. The news this summer has been filled with real life spy stories from America, the Soviet Union, and West Germany. This month, the US State Department charged that Soviet agents were using a potentially hazardous chemical dust to monitor the movements of American diplomats in the Soviet Union. And another huge spy scandal is still unfolding in West Germany, where several government workers have mysteriously disappeared.
- [04:41]
Julie Cohn
By way of a little background, we're in sort of the height of the Cold War. 1985 is the first year of Ronald Reagan's second term. Reagan was famously very anti Soviet, called them the evil empire, and had set up his administration to stand tall against the threat of Communism. There had been earlier attempts at detente between the two nations, but Reagan felt we needed to be tougher. We needed to have an arms race. Meanwhile, two months after Reagan swearing in, the head of the Soviet Union died and was replaced by Mikhail Gorbachev. And he was primed and ready to make his mark. In other words, the heads of both superpowers were each beginning a fresh new term that year. Eager to defeat the opponent on both sides, cloak and dagger, intelligence activity ramped up. Stephen Engelberg, now a career journalist with a Pulitzer Prize under his belt, enjoyed reminiscing about this time early in his career when he had just become the New York Times young intelligence reporter.
- [05:39]
Paul Redmond
And so I thought, wow, okay, let's get into the great game. You know, the east west confrontation, the binary that defined our world growing up in the 70s, 80s and, you know, as far as we knew, was going to define our world forever. At the time, half the world was basically either, you know, the Soviet Union or under Soviet sort of control or influence. And, you know, so each side recruiting spies was a great story.
- [06:08]
Julie Cohn
He had no way to know just how great of a story espionage would become. Here's President Ronald Reagan that year delivering his address on preventing espionage. Operations to protect America's secrets are usually done quietly with little publicity. While lately they've been making big news. Some of you may be wondering if the large number of spy arrests in recent weeks means that we're Looking harder or whether there are more spies to find?
- [06:35]
Stephen Engelberg
Well, I think the answer to both questions is yes.
- [06:40]
Julie Cohn
That clip was from November, the end of 1985. I want to roll back the clock a bit to the beginning of that year as the storm was just brewing. 1985 would begin with the FBI's arrests of John Walker, a Navy officer who sold millions of dollars worth of naval secrets to the Soviets. Betrayal he accomplished with the help of his own son, by the way, and a friend in the Navy.
- [07:06]
Stephen Engelberg
Former US Navy man John Walker was arrested earlier this year, accused of directing a family spy ring that sold US Naval secrets to the Soviet Union. Walker's son Michael and brother Arthur were also arrested.
- [07:20]
Julie Cohn
The news rocked America, but no one could have guessed then that the Walker spy ring would be just the first in a cascade of other arrests on both sides of the Iron Curtain. And nowhere was a disaster of compromised assets, executions and deception campaigns greater than in the CIA's Soviet and Eastern European Division, also known as the SE Division. In the beginning of 1985, the SE Division had begun mysteriously and inexplicably losing assets. And when I say assets, I mean Soviets secretly working for the CIA. They were losing them one after another after another. Now at the CIA, when an asset suddenly vanishes, suddenly stops showing up for meetings, there's an instant sinking feeling in the pit of everyone's stomachs. Maybe they've been found out. And if the Soviets have discovered somehow that one of their own is working for the CIA, that asset, that man who's been passing us information in secret, is likely facing the worst possible abduction, torture, execution. In early 1985, the CIA needed to figure out why they were losing assets before any more could be compromised. Was it human error? Technical ingenuity on the part of the Soviets? You know, maybe a listening device we weren't aware of? Or the most frightening possibility of all. Did the CIA have a mole in their own ranks? Milt Bearden, transferred to the SE Division that year from his previous post as the CIA Chief of Station in Lagos, Nigeria. He's a burly, cowboy boot wearing Oklahoman who at the time was known for risk taking and running covert ops in the third world. This was his first time in the shadowy high strategy chess game of Soviet operations. And the rest of the team saw him as a bit of an outsider.
- [09:15]
Milt Bearden
At first it seemed like every few days in the morning I'd come in and there's another arrest in Moscow or some stuff, and we've got another loss of an agent in Moscow and I'M saying, what the hell is this?
- [09:29]
Julie Cohn
Yeah, you really came. You had to hit the ground running.
- [09:34]
Milt Bearden
Well, yeah, or, you know, it hit the ground when it was all dumping. I mean, my God, what a time. That was awful.
- [09:41]
Julie Cohn
First, there was a warning alert that was triggered in the CIA's Moscow station. The CIA had figured out a way to tap the subterranean communication line between Moscow and a nuclear weapons research facility. That operation was codenamed Tall. Every so often, a CIA officer would have to drop down into a concealed manhole to retrieve clandestine recordings, which were on tapes. Because 1980 and Taw had worked flawlessly for five years until the spring of 1985, when the machine broadcast an alert to warn the CIA that the device had been tampered with. There was hope it might just be a glitch. But when the agent dropped down to collect the recordings, the tapes were empty. Second, a few months later, in May, Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer living in London who'd been informing for the British, was called back to Moscow unexpectedly. And just before he had been recalled, the British had shared some of his intel with the CIA, who had given him the codename Tickle. Believe it or not, Tickle might have just helped us avoid World War 3 Super Cool Story podcast for another time. But when Tickle went back to Moscow, he then missed the meetings and check ins he was supposed to be having with his British handlers. In other words, Tickle seemed to have ominously vanished.
- [11:08]
Paul Redmond
I went batshit, loudly, profanely over Gordievsky and I remember yelling, I said, the Brits run this guy and we find out about it and three or four months later, he's compromised.
- [11:22]
John Seifer
We got a fucking problem.
- [11:24]
Paul Redmond
I remember hollowing up.
- [11:26]
Julie Cohn
That was Paul Redmond. He's a counterintelligence legend at the CIA. By 1985, where our story begins, Paul had become a branch chief in the Soviet and Eastern European division of the CIA, covering Moscow and Leningrad in particular. In his long and decorated career, Paul would go on to become deputy chief of the CIA's counterintelligence center. And later, after 9 11, he'd be called in to become director for counterterrorism at the CIA. Paul Redmond is famous not only for being a bow tie wearing, world famous spy catcher, but also for being, shall we say, rough around the edges. He was famous for losing his temper, especially over bureaucratic red tape. In books about Cold War espionage, Paul has been described as an irascible, irreverent, Boston Irish, Harvard man who was fluent in Serbo, Croatian and profanity it was fun when he stayed true to what I had read about him.
- [12:28]
Paul Redmond
Tommy Blackler, well, he has a mouth.
- [12:30]
Milt Bearden
On him, but you wouldn't believe this.
- [12:32]
Paul Redmond
Woman says to me, paul, you know, you're the only other person in this town has a worse mouth on him than Tommy. I said, madam, I take that as a fucking compliment.
- [12:43]
Milt Bearden
I'm sorry.
- [12:45]
Julie Cohn
After Tickle, things then went from bad to worse. Just two days later, on May 21, a KGB officer secretly working for the CIA in Greece, codenamed Blizzard, also got a mysterious recall cable from Moscow. His 18 year old son wasn't doing well in military school, it said, and Blizzard would need to come home to deal with him. Only Blizzard had just spoken to his family a few days earlier and happened to know that his son was doing just fine. So he immediately contacted his CIA handlers.
- [13:20]
Paul Redmond
We got a cable. I mean, I knew the case. Got a cable saying that Bliz came to a meeting in a safe house without saying he got a cable from Moscow saying that they wanted him to come home. And my recollection was it was something to do with his son who was in late teens or early 20s, who was in a military school. And Blizz needed to come home to cope with that. I smelled a rat. I said, things don't work in Soviet Union like this. We exfiltrated him and saved his life.
- [13:56]
Julie Cohn
Sadly, Blizzard would be one of the only assets recalled back to Moscow who would survive to tell the tale. And that rat smells only got worse. With a terrible fourth blow in June. Adolf Tolkachev, codenamed Vanquish, was an asset who had gone above and beyond, repeatedly risking his life to take secret photographs of classified Soviet military technology that wound up saving the US military well over a billion dollars in manufacturing costs. Later, it gave him the moniker the Billion Dollar Spy. He was such a valuable asset with such a heart of gold that there is a giant oil painting of him carefully taking photos on a tiny spy camera at night that hangs to this day at CIA headquarters in Langley. On June 13, when Vanquish's CIA handler came to meet with him, the American got brutally ambushed by the kgb. Turns out that Vanquish had been arrested weeks earlier and the KGB had used him to lose were his American handler to that meeting. Those sirens you just heard are from a video filmed by the KGB of Vanquish's arrest and aired in a Soviet documentary many years ago. It's crazy to watch in that video as Vanquish is pulled over on the way home from his country house by KGB officers dressed up as cops. You see them forcefully pin his arms behind his back, shove a white cloth in his mouth and force him into a car. His CIA handler with his diplomatic immunity was thrown out of the country. After months of grueling interrogation, Vanquish faced a different fate. That is the actual audio from the verdict at Vanquish's trial. It means Tolkachev is found guilty of treason in the form of espionage and sentenced to death. Vanquish was led to a windowless cell in Lubyanka prison, where, in classic KGB executioner form, he was shot in the back of the head, point blank with a handgun. The CIA wouldn't learn of his murder until quite a bit later. All they knew at that point in June was that Vanquish's cover had clearly been blown somehow and the CIA had lost all touch with him. One or two losses could be coincidence, but four in a row? That's not bad luck. That's a deadly serious problem.
- [16:47]
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- [17:48]
Julie Cohn
As the agency was scrambling to make sense of it all, I'd like to turn our attention around the world to somewhere you probably wouldn't associate with Cold War drama. Not East Berlin, not by a long shot. Rome, in the heart of Western Europe, complete with its luxury cars, fine leather, and designer clothing. Because the thing is, it's precisely in cities like Rome, where some of the juiciest Soviet spy stories begin. If a Soviet spy was ever going to volunteer his or her services to the Americans, for instance, they wouldn't do it in Moscow, under the omnipresent eyes of the State security or anywhere near the oppressive East German secret police. Say they'd try to do it somewhere like Africa or Western Europe, where the grip of the Soviet authority wasn't as tight. So I'd like to bring us to Rome and specifically to the morning of August 1, 1985, where already it was a scorcher of a summer day on that morning. And in that city, a Soviet colonel named Vitaly Yurchenko, who had flown in from Moscow just a few days before, was about to walk in and volunteer his services as a spy for the CIA. Yurchenko was incredibly nervous, but he was, after all, a professional Soviet intelligence officer, an expert in deception and hiding his feelings. That morning, he told his colleagues nonchalantly that he wanted to take in the sights of the Vatican. Vitaly Yurchenko's sightseeing wound up lasting hours. If you weren't paying attention, you. You might not have thought anything of the way he stopped while wandering to rest and watch the flow of tourists or the museums he walked into or the different exits he walked out of. Vitaly Archenko was on what in American spy parlance is known as a dry cleaning run. It meant he was taking actions to assess whether or not he was being followed without his followers realizing he was checking. Finally, satisfied he was black or unsurveilled, Vitaly Yurchenko made his way three and a half kilometers away from the Vatican to the Ambassiatore Hotel, a five star establishment which just happened to be located across the street from the American Embassy in Rome. Vitale walked into the opulent lobby and across the marble floor to a payphone inside the hotel and called that American embassy. He asked to speak to David, who served in Leningrad. Vitaly introduced himself as a Soviet official and said he wanted to come over to your side. David wasn't a diplomat. He was a CIA officer working under official State Department cover. And that call that morning would set in motion one of the most dizzying high stakes espionage debacles of the last century. As he would later explain before his jaunt, before his morning meeting actually back at the Soviet compound or residentura, Vitale had carefully studied the KGB staff's diagram of suspected CIA presence in Rome and then grilled them on it, which was a perfectly natural thing for a man of his rank to do. See, Yurchenko worked in the KGB's famed First Chief Directorate. The KGB was like the FBI, the CIA and the police all rolled into one big huge organization. In the mid-1970s KGB officers. In the city of Moscow alone, 50,000 of them outnumbered all the employees of the CIA and FBI combined. And within the KGB, the first chief directorate was like their CIA. It was this elite division that handled their foreign intelligence operations. And Vitaly Yurchenko served in that first direction as a rising colonel. And just before his trip to Rome, he had been in training to be a general. So Vitaly Archenko in this vast organization was basically the 1% of the 1%. He had flown to Rome to interview an American military officer who had claimed to have information he wanted to sell to the Soviets. That American military officer was actually a plant or double agent, meaning he was a US Intelligence officer who was pretending to want to work with the Soviets with the goal of reporting everything he learned back to the US And Vitaly would later claim he could smell the guy was a fake even before he had come to Italy. The thing was, he needed a reason to leave Moscow, just like he needed a reason to study that CIA diagram. As Yurchenko studied it, he noticed the names of people he vaguely recognized, then stopped at David's name. Ten years earlier, and given his rank even then, Yurchenko had been in a position to know that David had been brutally seized by the KGB in Leningrad because the source David had been handling was actually a double agent under KGB control. Now, a quick background on embassy walk ins. These are people who stroll up to an American volunteering to work for the United States. Volunteer spies, Watkins, are always treated carefully. Our best Soviet assets, Popov, Penkovsky, and even Vanquish were all walk ins at the same time. However, walk ins are also famously unreliable. And any CIA officer who welcomes in a walk in needs to be very careful they aren't being duped by a fraud, or worse, something called a dangle. Let's start with the fraud danger. One famous fraud posed as a Libyan Secret Service agent. He wasn't even from Libya and used a totally fake name and demanded $25,000 in exchange for intel he claimed to have on an impending assassination of Ronald Reagan. Totally bogus. But no one wants to be the guy who turned away the warning call. So he got paid. It is so shocking to me that there are men and women who make an actual career out of conning the CIA for cash. I get it. Fear sells. But it takes a very special kind of nerve to try and trick and outsmart something literally called an intelligence agency. Anyway, in the case of Vitaly Yurchenko, David had an immediate clue that he was not a fraud. Because Yurchenko knew about David's bad luck in Leningrad, and only a very select group of KGB officers would have been able to know that. And that's all just from the first minute of Yurchenko's phone call. So when David discovered that Yurchenko was standing in a payphone booth right across the street, he immediately urged the man to come in in person. Soon, David met Vitaly Yurchenko at Marine Post 1 at the U.S. embassy and ushered him into the embassy's walk in room designed for interviews, complete with hidden wiring for audio and visual recording. Yurchenko immediately found the concealed camera in the bookshelf, stared into it, introduced himself and handed over his identification documents. Once they sat face to face, David continued to dig and got more and more assurance. Once Yurchenko handed over his diplomatic passport, some quick research revealed that he was real alright. He had recently worked at the Soviet residentura in Washington D.C. for five years. The question was, could they be certain that this man here in their walk in room was who that passport claimed he was? And the answer came pretty quickly. Yurchenko was missing part of a finger on his right hand, an injury from a winching accident while sailing. And the man sitting there claiming to be Yurchenko was missing that same finger. Okay, so once a fraud is ruled out, the CIA has to determine whether the walk in is a dangle or double agent, which, as we mentioned, in this case it would be a real Soviet agent posing as a volunteer, but working the whole time for the kgb. As soon as Yurchenko had introduced himself and handed over all his documents, David could also be pretty confident. This man wasn't your typical dangle. Yurchenko was a colonel in the KGB at the time. The US and the Soviets knew that both sides had access to a psychotropic barbiturate known as truth serum. In fact, the Soviets were in the habit of using those drugs quite often. Neither side would risk dangling someone with high clearance in the event they got strapped to a chair and truth serum into confessing everything they knew.
- [26:22]
John Seifer
Russians know in their mind that they use drugs on people. And they often assume part of the problem is they assume we think the same way they do. Like I then wonder, why would you send someone to be in the belly of the beast where you think that they might actually be drugged and in the process, actually, even if they're as trained as they can be, give up stuff?
- [26:45]
Julie Cohn
That was John Seifer, who worked for 28 years in the clandestine service of the CIA, including an assignment as chief of station in Moscow. He's the recipient of the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, though exactly why he received it is classified. I once wrote a treatment for John and his business partner Jerry, who are now also film producers in Hollywood.
- [27:08]
John Seifer
I worked for 28 years in the clandestine service of the CIA. A lot of my work was based on Russia. I served in Moscow and ran our Russian operations from headquarters. And now I run a company called Spycraft Entertainment, trying to do better espionage movies with Hollywood.
- [27:26]
Julie Cohn
John also served as a lead instructor in the CIA's clandestine training school, the Farm. And if you're thinking like that's his name, John Cipher, like Joe Seeker Code, he gets that a lot. If it helps though, Cipher's with an S and not a C. As John explains, Vitaly Yurchenko basically was far too big a fish to risk as bait. Though he had an early sense that Yurchenko was neither a fraud nor a dangle. Once they sat face to face, David continued to dig and got more and more assurance. Now, I had read about and been told about what was said in that walk in room, but I wanted to hear it firsthand. It took a long time, but eventually I was able to track David down. David has never spoken to the press, ever. He took an oath of secrecy to this country, he said, and it's one he takes very seriously. I admire that a lot, actually. But someone else in the CIA had already used David's name in recounting the events of that afternoon. So it was out there in at least three public sources. The trouble was, none of them actually quoted David, and none of them, it turns out, was quite accurate. I wanted to avoid being a part of that game of telephone, so I sent David what had been published and waited to hear back. In the end, David agreed to take part. He said he would correct mistakes in past reporting and would allow me to quote our correspondence. So what you're about to hear is the only version so far based on the word of one of the only people who was actually there. David refers to Yurchenko as Y in our emails and writes, as a career CIA officer focused on the Soviet Union and the kgb, it was immediately apparent to me that Y was probably bonafide. There were many indicators that suggested he was who he said he was. Which means if he was who he claimed to be, there was a chance that the highest ranked KGB officer ever to want to defect to the United States had just fallen into David's lap. Not only was Yurchenko a colonel and the first Chief Directorate, but David learned he was the deputy Chief in the elite first department, whose focus was North America. Basically, among other things, it was Vitaly Yurchenko's job to oversee the recruitment and the handling of Americans to spy for the kgb. This was huge. David welcomed and thanked him, then began a list of questions, standard protocol that he'd been trained to ask straight away. The first was whether Yurchenko knew of any potential hostilities planned against the United States. He said no. Cool. Second question. Did he know of any intelligence penetration of the United States by the KGB or any intelligence organization? The answer on this one was yes, and he would share that and more if he could defect to America immediately. David knew that Yurchenko was more valuable as an asset inside Russia than outside of it. This might sound counterintuitive at first. If the biggest fish walks into your embassy and wants to tell all to defect, wouldn't you just agree? And quickly, here's John Seifer.
- [30:50]
John Seifer
So, in the CIA, our job is to recruit people to stay in place. It's not a failure, per se, but it's not a good thing to be involved with someone like this and convince them to defect. Or when they come to you and they say, I want to defect, your goal is to try to talk to them, to try to convince them, if you can, if it makes sense to stay in place. Usually what our goal is to say, oh, I understand your concern. Let's walk through it. We'd like you to actually go back. You know, if we're worried about security, won't meet you there. We'll meet you next time you come out. And, you know, if we can work together for a number of years, we'll be able to pay you and collect money so that when you do, if you do eventually choose to move to the west, you have a good amount of money. We're prepared, because that's where the information is. You want a defector, that person's information is interesting and useful for a short period of time, but it's fleeting.
- [31:45]
Julie Cohn
A defector is a one and done. An asset in place is a continuous and invaluable source of information for years to come. So David tried to do just that. He assured Yurchenko that should they work together, the CIA would do everything in its power to ensure a seamless exfiltration for Yurchenko and his family. Eventually, it could take the Agency maybe months to plan the perfect escape, or. Or even a year. The thing is, Vitaly Yurchenko was just as much a Cold War veteran as David. He knew the shtick that David was playing for Time. But he wasn't going back to Moscow. He wanted to go to America right now, and he didn't want his family to come with him. There wasn't time. He told David that he was expected back at the Residencura for a meeting over an hour ago. So by this point in the evening, the KGB would already be looking for him. In a few more hours, they'd know something was desperately wrong and likely alert the Italian carabinieri. In other words, if the CIA didn't act soon, Yurchenko's name would be at every border crossing, airport, and train station in Italy. What he didn't tell David, something he would explain only later, was that there was a bigger reason. The Soviet was in a hurry. Vitaly Yurchenko thought he was dying of the same cancer that had just taken his mother's life a few months earlier in May. In fact, the only things he had on his person when he walked into the embassy were his identification and a bag of weird Russian herbs he was convinced would help soothe his stomach pain. And as for not wanting his wife to come with him, what he also didn't tell David was that in what he believed to be his final months on Earth, Yurchenko hoped to be reunited with the love of his life, a woman named Valentina Yaraskovskaya, who at that time in 1985, lived in Montreal, still married to her Soviet diplomat husband. Here is Milt Bearden again, the new deputy chief of the SE Division.
- [33:45]
Milt Bearden
The other thing he really wanted, that came out a little bit later, was that he wanted to be reunited with his beloved girl that he had a fling with when he was in Washington before the woman up in. In Canada, which was part of his whole defection plan, because she was out of the USSR Up. Just up across the border in Canada. And he had it all figured out. He came because he could have his remaining days with Valentina. He'd be well taken out of care of by the CIA, and it would all be kept quiet. And then he'd die of colon cancer like his mother, right?
- [34:30]
Julie Cohn
Yurchenko told David he had only one condition for his defection. Complete secrecy. He didn't want any publicity about his case because he would be leaving his wife and children in Moscow. If it came out that he had defected, they would face severe repercussions. In the past, family members of defectors had lost their property, their reputations, their careers, and some had even been sent to labor camps in Siberia. And if anyone understood that risk, it was Yurchenko. Because in addition to Overseeing spying on Americans. David told me why. Explain to me that he was the KGB expert on all past KGB defections and redefections, meaning he knew exactly what fate would befall the families of Soviets who defected west because he himself had been their judge and jury. David wrote in this context. He explained that his concern was for his family in Moscow. According to y, as long as the KGB did not know what happened to him or where he was, his family would not be endangered. Therefore, it was critical that he decide when it came out that he was with the CIA. But Yurchenko knew this was all asking a lot. So to make any of it even plausible, he knew he would have to prove his worth first, and he would start with the yes. He gave to David's second question. The Soviet knew the CIA had a mole. We call him Mr. Robert. He said he knew what day and where. In Vienna the man had walked in to volunteer his services to the kgb. He knew that Robert had been trained to work in Moscow but had been fired before he could go on account of failing a polygraph test. Yurchenko knew a lot. The man's height, hair color, demeanor. Because Vitaly Yurchenko had handled him personally. Now remember, it was the year of the spy. The CIA was already worried something was amiss. A secret operation blown. Two agents mysteriously recalled and one arrested. Taw, Blizzard, Tickle, Vanquish. And in the middle of it all walked Vitaly Yurchenko, now offering up an answer to the CIA's question of what the hell might be causing those losses. If Yurchenko was right, it was a huge deal. Amul, a CIA agent betraying the agency from within. One that would explain the Soviet and Eastern Europe division's brutal and mysterious losses, which had been piling up since January.
- [37:01]
Unknown
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- [37:35]
Julie Cohn
Back at headquarters, Yurchenko's Robert revelation dropped like a bomb. Milt Bearden recalls the moment.
- [37:42]
Milt Bearden
Well, I was in the office right next to the chief of the division, Burton Gerber and I heard sort of a. Not a scream, but a sort of a howl or like, you know, something. And I actually got up and walk around the corner, and he said, it's Howard.
- [37:57]
Julie Cohn
Just immediately like, no. It was so clear.
- [37:59]
Milt Bearden
Oh, no. He knew it absolutely instantly from the description in the cable.
- [38:04]
Julie Cohn
Sure, Gerber knew instantly who Yurchenko was referring to. A man named Edward Lee Howard. Because the intimate details the Soviet had provided left little doubt. And on top of the Howard revelation, Vitalyochenko also claimed to have intelligence about a KGB officer in London who had been recently called back to Moscow. It seemed pretty clear he was talking about Tickle, the KGB officer who had been working for the British who had recently vanished. Yurchenko revealed that once that man returned to Moscow, he had been kidnapped, imprisoned, and drugged. The KGB didn't have all the proof it needed yet that he had betrayed them, but they were trying to get him to confess. That confirmed the CIA's fears that the assets who had been recalled, who were missing their meetings, their covers were blown, and they were meeting horrible fates. Given the ticking clock, the countdown before Yurchenko's absence would trigger an APB across Rome, given that he had just unveiled a mole inside the CIA, and given he was a colonel in the department of the KGB whose focus was spying on America, the decision was made to get Yurchenko out of Italy before it was too late. Headquarters wanted him to be moved to Washington D.C. aSAP. David wrote, we knew that the local KGB would try to find him once they realized he was missing. We arranged for a plane to fly from Germany to Sigonella Naval Base asap. We put Y in disguise and drove him to Sigonella within about three hours after he walked in. Y said it would have taken two to three days for the KGB to do what we did in a few hours. He seemed impressed from the time he walked into the US Embassy until he was on his flight in just three hours. One of the most elite KGB defectors in history was on his way to America. And yet, somehow, this would turn out to be the least extraordinary thing about Vitaly Yurchenko's story. 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 Waveland Media. For more information on this series and more. Thanks for listening.