Tass Sees U.S. ‘Terrorism’ in Yurchenko Case

The Soviet news agency Tass accused the United States on Tuesday of kidnaping and torturing KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko in an “act of terrorism.”

At the same time, Secretary of State George P. Shultz said the charges Yurchenko has made against the CIA are “totally false.” Shultz said that he and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who met for four hours Tuesday, briefly discussed the case of Yurchenko, described by U.S. officials as a top KGB officer who defected last July.

The Tass report repeated, in lurid language, the accusations made by Yurchenko on Monday in a press conference at the Soviet Embassy in Washington.

Yurchenko, who said he escaped from the CIA last Saturday after being held for nearly three months, insisted that he was an innocent diplomat, that he was abducted in Rome, drugged and taken to the United States.

“That was not only an act of terrorism,” Tass said. “It was a flagrant violation of the elementary human rights of the Soviet diplomat, whom they wanted, with the help of drugs and threats, to make (into) an unthinking, senseless thing, a dumb beast obediently doing the will of those who sanctioned this outrageous violence. . . . This is an outrage which cannot be reconciled in any way with the generally accepted standards of human morals and justice or international law.”

‘Pose as Champions’

In an apparent reference to President Reagan’s repeated complaints about Soviet human rights violations, Tass said the actions against Yurchenko were “committed by those who are accustomed to shout loudly about alleged violations of civil rights and liberties in the East and who pose as champions of these liberties.”

It is considered likely that Gorbachev will bring up the Yurchenko case at his Nov. 19-20 summit with Reagan to counter the expected U.S. attacks on Moscow’s human rights record.

Yurchenko’s story recalled a similar incident in September, 1984, when Oleg Bitov, a writer for the Soviet Literary Gazette, charged that he had been kidnaped and tortured by British intelligence. Bitov had spent nearly a year in Britain before he reappeared in Moscow, alleging that he had been kidnaped in Venice, drugged and taken to London.