KGB Defector Says He Was Kidnaped : U.S. Denies Yurchenko Torture Claim, Will Insist on Questioning Soviet Agent

Soviet KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko, whose defection on July 28 had been billed as the greatest American intelligence coup in 50 years, turned up suddenly Monday at the Soviet Embassy and charged that he had been kidnaped and tortured with drugs by U.S. agents in a heavily guarded safehouse in the Virginia countryside.

The State Department quickly denied the charges, which Yurchenko made in a dramatic news conference at the Soviets’ residential compound. A department spokesman said Yurchenko will not be allowed to leave the United States until American officials can meet with him “in an environment free of Soviet coercion.”

Yurchenko, in an hourlong press conference at the side of obviously gleeful Soviet officials, complained of “barbaric” treatment at the hands of the CIA. He also said he dined with CIA Director William J. Casey and was offered $1 million to remain in the United States and maintain his silence.

Heavily Guarded Estate

He said he escaped Saturday from a heavily guarded 500-acre estate in western Virginia “due to a momentary lapse of attention on the part of persons watching me.” He implied that he then hitchhiked to the Soviet Embassy compound.

Sen. Dave Durenberger (R-Minn.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters that Yurchenko had been scheduled to attend a dinner at CIA headquarters Saturday evening and “never showed up.”

U.S. intelligence experts said Yurchenko’s return to the Soviet fold could be the most embarrassing and potentially costly blunder in recent American intelligence history.

They suggested that Yurchenko’s apparent decision to return home had concluded a successful Soviet plot to plant phony information with U.S. intelligence officials, learn the details of American methods for debriefing defectors and score a final propaganda coup at U.S. expense.

The spectacle of Yurchenko’s move, with its charges of CIA misbehavior, “did great damage,” a former top CIA official said. “It’ll be all over the world, and much of the world will believe it.”

American intelligence officials had gloated publicly after it was disclosed that Yurchenko, then believed to be the fifth-ranking official in the Soviet intelligence apparatus, had sought U.S. protection.

State Department officials said on Oct. 11 that Yurchenko “was specifically responsible for the direction of KGB intelligence operations in the U.S. and Canada.” CIA Director Casey apparently alluded to him in a September magazine interview when he said: “I happen to think that in the intelligence arena we are probably ahead (of the Soviets). . . . A number of their most senior people gave up and turned against them.”

News accounts credited Yurchenko with providing information on at least one Soviet “mole” in the CIA bureaucracy--Edward L. Howard, a former CIA employee who disappeared from his home in Santa Fe, N.M., last month.

U.S. intelligence officials also said Yurchenko had warned them of fluorescent “spy dust” used by the Soviets to track the movements of American diplomats and others around Moscow.

But Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) and the former high CIA official said those pieces of information may have been deliberately “thrown away” by the KGB to make Yurchenko’s “defection” to the West appear more genuine.

Explanations for Move

Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said there were two possible explanations of Yurchenko’s saga.

“The first is that he was a double agent all along and now is going out of his way to embarrass the United States as much as possible,” Leahy said. “The second possibility is that he’s going back, he wants to go back, and he has to invent a story for them that he hopes they will believe.”

After Yurchenko’s return to Soviet hands, Soviet Charge d’Affaires Oleg Sokolov filed a formal protest of Yurchenko’s “monstrously inhumane” treatment with the State Department and demanded that the 49-year-old KGB officer be allowed to leave the country immediately.

At his press conference at the Soviet compound, Yurchenko overcame a nervous and hesitant beginning to give a virtuoso performance for the battery of television cameras. He accused the United States of “state-sponsored terrorism” and called his alleged CIA captors “ruthless,” stupid and barbaric.

Although the gray-suited Yurchenko complained of three “horrible” months at the hands of his CIA captors, he looked none the worse for wear for his experience, showing no marks or bruises and appearing to be in good health.

‘Abuducted’ in Rome

Speaking both in heavily accented English and in Russian, Yurchenko maintained that he was abducted from a Rome street on Aug. 1 by “unknown persons” and flown, unconscious, to a three-story CIA safehouse near Fredericksburg, Va. There, he said, he was tortured and injected with drugs by two CIA operatives.

Yurchenko said he revealed no Soviet secrets while his mind was clear, but was uncertain what he said while under the influence of drugs. He claimed to have been repeatedly threatened with drug-induced insanity or death if he failed to cooperate with his abductors.

He also contended that he had been lavishly entertained and offered huge bribes for his cooperation. At one point, he said, he was drugged and taken by the CIA to a dinner with Casey and the chief of the CIA’s Soviet desk on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters, where he discussed political “generalities.”

In the last three weeks, he said, CIA officials realized their torture was not succeeding and adopted “a more relaxed regime,” offering him a $1-million tax-free bonus to stay in the United States and keep silent.

“That was a down payment,” he said. “And to the end of my life they were going to pay me $62,500 annually, and that sum would grow accounting for inflation.” He also claimed the CIA offered him free medical care and $48,000 of furniture from the safehouse.

Read ‘A Thousand Books’

In what might have been a parting jab at his former CIA debriefers, Yurchenko said at the end of the news conference, “I know your side now better than reading a thousand books about it.”

Indeed, that is what U.S. officials fear most.

If Yurchenko was a Soviet plant from the beginning, Wallop said, he has presumably given his Soviet superiors a detailed account of his interrogation by the CIA, including the methods used and--more important--the areas of knowledge the CIA was most interested in.

Yurchenko also may have given the CIA phony or misleading information about Soviet intelligence operations--information that, if the United States acted on it, could help the KGB identify U.S. agents and methods. He may have provided self-serving false information about Kremlin policies in the months before the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, this official said.

The CIA was apparently completely deceived by the KGB officer. Wallop said he asked deputy CIA Deputy Director John McMahon last week if the agency was being properly skeptical about the defector, and “McMahon said, ‘He’s for real.’ ‘

The State Department said only that Yurchenko “willingly cooperated” with American intelligence debriefers and that the information he provided “continues to be processed and assessed by the intelligence community.” His voluntary return to Soviet hands is evidence that “at no time was Mr. Yurchenko coerced by improper, illegal or unethical means,” the department said.

“It is Mr. Yurchenko’s right to return to the Soviet Union once the United States government is, in fact, assured that this action is genuinely of his own choosing,” spokesman Charles Redman stated.