This was unquestionably a big blow for the US authorities as only a few weeks ago, the CIA had presented Yurchenko's defection as a major success story. The Americans were thus ridiculed and President Reagan himself was weakened. There was no doubt that he would be in trouble the next time he had an arm wrestle with Gorbachev.
The CIA still tried to save face and explained that this second defection was really a love story: Yurchenko was madly in love and this was why he had thrown himself into the arms of the Americans in Rome. His sweetheart's name was Valentina and was the wife of a Soviet diplomat. Yurchenko had apparently met her when he was stationed in Washington in 1970 and ever since his return to Moscow he had pined for her. In 1985, her husband was a diplomat posted to Canada, and with America's help, Yurchenko reached out to her. He had asked the CIA to help him see his beloved and on two occasions, was escorted by CIA agents to Montreal. However, she no longer wanted to see him and so the Soviet was plunged into a deep depression that would eventually see him deciding to return to the motherland.
This was hardly a credible explanation and this sentimental love story did not convince many people. However, it was possible that Yurchenko, who had the reputation of being a womanizer, did have an affair with Valentina. The question was whether he would have defected just to find a woman whom he had not seen for five years and who he did not know if she still loved him? It seems very strange. It is more likely that Yurchenko's roundtrip was planned from the start and he was part of an operation that had been devised with great subtlety.
BenoTt Rayski
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What kind of comedy do you prefer? Funny or surreal? The Marx Brothers, Hellazpoppin or Airplane!? For the Yurchenko affair, which smeared the United States, and above all, the White House, you have an embarrassment of riches, unless you prefer a more topical titles, such as How Ronnie was conned by Vitaly? It was Ronald Reagan who, in this tragedy, was masterfully outplayed by Mikhail Gorbachev and appeared as nothing more than a lone, lamentable victim.This is a man who some extol, with an enthusiasm worthy of a better cause, as a talented communicator who denounces human rights violations in the USSR, calling it an ‘Evil Empire’. Here is a man who multiplies media initiatives, speeches and interviews, in the hope of sitting in front of Gorbachev on 19 November in Geneva, and making him out to be a loser. Well, today this man finds himself humiliated by a spy, Vitaly Yurchenko, whose defection the Americans triumphed at and who has now announced from the USSR embassy in Washington, that he had been kidnapped by the CIA, tortured and forced to declare who knows what. When Ronald Reagan is in Geneva on 19 November, he knows he will have to accept the knowing smiles of Gorbachev without flinching, with the latter of the two being by far the best player at the game.
The war waged by the secret services is often psychological. It is important to make a point to your opponent, but the main principle is to leave him wanting more and the Yurchenko affair is actually an example of a destabilising operation. To help understand it better, it is useful to leave this case behind for a moment and instead refer to the Ivy Bells Operation: a truly sensational case! Here the US had devised a very sophisticated system of spying on Soviet operations in the Sea of Othotsk, in the east of the USSR and off Sakhalin Island. This was a very popular area for Soviet nuclear submarines and a place where ballistic missile tests were regularly conducted, thus making it a very sensitive military zone as well.
The Americans had wanted to know more about these tests for a long time and the technicians at the NSA, America's largest intelligence agency, had finally found the solution: tap the underwater cables used by the Russians and intercept the information sent through them. The information itself was not even encrypted, as the Russians believed completely in the invulnerability of their technology.
The procedure was as follows: a submarine first marks one of the cables at the bottom of the sea. Then divers attach a kind of box to the cable, which is full of sound recorders and voila! Now all communications that pass along the cable will be electronically recorded, without actually damaging the cable itself: a truly remarkable technological feat. It was even programmed so that if, for one reason or another, there was a failure and the Russians retracted the cable, the box would detach itself at the slightest movement. The only catch was that the information gathered was collected only twice a year, due to the fact that the area was full of anti-submarine patrols. This meant that the information was not very fresh, but thanks to this terminal, the NSA were able to collect very specific information on the missile launches.
The system operated until 1981, when a US satellite that regularly took images of the Sea of Okhotsk captured a group of vessels just above the site where the terminal was attached to the Soviet cable. This did not necessarily mean that the Russians had discovered the device, but in all likelihood, they knew exactly where they should look. The NSA was in no doubt: they had been betrayed. In short, human
