Book Tells How Ex-Gromyko Aide Helped Break Secret Codes : Major Soviet Defector Was Also CIA Spy

Arkady Shevchenko, the highest-ranking Soviet diplomat to defect to the United States since World War II, was a spy for the CIA for 2 1/2 years before coming in from the cold and seeking asylum in this country in 1978, according to excerpts published Monday from his book.

Shevchenko, a former top adviser to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko and undersecretary general of the United Nations at the time of his defection, said in the book that he had reluctantly agreed to spy for the Americans only after becoming disenchanted with the Soviet system.

Outdoing Machiavelli

“If Machiavelli were alive and living in the Soviet elite today, he would be a student, not a professor,” Shevchenko said in a reference to the 16th-Century Italian political theorist whose name is synonymous with craftiness and deceit.

The book, entitled “Breaking With Moscow,” follows the author from his days as a student at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations through his years as a U.N. diplomat and secret American agent. The volume, scheduled for publication this month, was excerpted in this week’s Time magazine.

The book discloses no major espionage coups resulting from Shevchenko’s spying for the United States from the fall of 1975 until April, 1978. But he said that he provided U.S. intelligence officials with revealing glimpses into the Soviet hierarchy, which he describes as riddled by intense personal rivalries and bureaucratic infighting.

“The most unpleasant aspect of party responsibility, and the party chore I found most demeaning, was the task of snooping into and supervising the personal lives of others,” Shevchenko wrote. “Communists are expected to set shining examples of behavior. When, instead, they engaged in amoralka (misconduct) . . . their peers are supposed to recall them to righteousness.”

Shevchenko said that he was also able to supply U.S. intelligence officials with extensive copies of Soviet cable traffic to and from the United Nations and Washington, enabling them to break the codes of secret Soviet messages from around the world. In addition, he gave Americans the top-secret “position papers” of Soviet negotiators during the second set of strategic arms limitation talks, according to the book.

Shevchenko, now 54 and living in the Washington area, joined the Soviet mission to the United Nations in 1963. Six years later, Gromyko offered him a post as an adviser. He left New York to take up his new duties in April, 1970, and remained there until 1973.

“Western speculation has given Gromyko the dubious honor of being the single most influential initiator of the Kremlin’s ultra-hard line toward the U.S. in the 1980s,” he says in the book. “This speculation seems to me far wide of the mark.”

Unlike many other Soviet leaders, he continues, Gromyko “strongly believes that the U.S. is not only the Soviet Union’s main adversary but in some respects also a partner, as long as the interest of both nations . . . are parallel or coincide.”

Wanted Freedom

In December, 1975, when serving as U.N. undersecretary general, Shevchenko approached a member of the U.S. delegation to the world organization and told him that he wanted to defect to the United States.

“I had everything except (one) very small thing--my own personal freedom,” Shevchenko said in an interview Sunday on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes.”

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time of Shevchenko’s defection, said that he was one of a handful of American officials--including former President Gerald R. Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger--who knew of the Russian’s espionage activities.

“This man’s life was at stake, which was one thing, but our foreign policy was at stake” as well, Moynihan said.