CIA Reportedly Ignored Yurchenko Depression : Disastrous Meeting With His Lover Cited

Soviet KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko re-defected to Moscow after his CIA overseers escorted him to a disastrous Canadian rendezvous with his lover, ignored his subsequent deep depression and left him alone long enough to secretly negotiate his return with Soviet officials, Administration sources said Saturday. The clandestine meeting, which the sources said dashed a love affair of more than seven years with the wife of the Soviet consul-general in Montreal, identified as Valentina Yereskovsky, was described by them as one of a series of CIA blunders that all but drove Yurchenko into Soviet hands. An “upset” President Reagan is considering an investigation into both the Yurchenko matter and CIA mishandling of other defectors, they said. “The people involved will get letters of reprimand, but I wouldn’t put this all on the junior people,” one official said. “It’s the senior people’s fault.” U.S. sources say the woman has been recalled to Moscow; Canadian sources said the wife of a Soviet diplomat left for the Soviet Union on Thursday. A spokesman at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa called the reported love affair “nonsense and misinformation. We are not partners in this deception campaign.” According to the sources in Washington, who spoke on the promise of anonymity, the CIA sometimes entrusted the handling of Yurchenko--described by the CIA as the KGB’s No. 2 official for American espionage--to lower-echelon agents and guards who spoke no Russian and repeatedly let him wander unattended.

Although Yurchenko was supposed to be constantly accompanied by two security guards, they said, he was once allowed to disappear for a short period into a Washington area bowling alley where he apparently telephoned Soviet Embassy officials.

Walked Out of Cafe

On the drizzly Saturday evening that he walked out of a Georgetown cafe less than a mile from the Soviet residential compound, Yurchenko was in the company of one CIA security service guard who made no effort to stop him when he left the table, according to the sources.

“He didn’t even get up,” one official said of the guard. “He thought Yurchenko was testing him.”

The disclosures came on the heels of an unusual CIA press release that detailed Yurchenko’s 25-year KGB career and claimed that his marriage was “seriously strained” before his reported decision in August to seek asylum in the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

The release appeared designed to bolster CIA contentions that Yurchenko was not a low-level agent “planted” to embarrass the Administration before the Geneva summit.

Administration sources said Saturday that officials still are not completely certain that Yurchenko was a sincere defector, but that 90% of the information he provided has been double-checked and proven accurate.

‘Lot of Good Information’

“He provided a lot of good information, despite all the conflicting stances about that,” one official said. “But you have to realize that if the Soviets were setting up an operative, he had to bring information that was genuine and could be corroborated.”

Yurchenko’s decision to return to the Soviet Union appears to have been made weeks before he actually left. But the intelligence agency never recognized “obvious signs” that Yurchenko was plotting to leave, the sources contended.

According to those sources, Yurchenko’s desire to leave the United States crystallized shortly after an early October drive with CIA officials to Montreal, where he and Yereskovsky met. Canadian officials confirm that a meeting occurred in the presence of Canadian intelligence officials, but some placed the session in Ottawa.

The meeting climaxed a love affair that apparently began in the late 1970s, when Yurchenko, Yereskovsky and her husband, Alexander S. Yereskovsky, were stationed in Washington. After Yurchenko returned to Moscow in 1980, the pair reportedly conducted the affair when Yereskovsky took extended home leaves.

In Mental Tailspin

One official said Yereskovsky’s refusal to leave Montreal left Yurchenko “despondent and depressed.” But the agency didn’t supply Yurchenko with psychiatric help, even though he went into an unmistakable mental tailspin after Yereskovsky rejected his pleas to defect to the United States and live with him. A psychologist spent some time with him, but was said to have provided companionship rather than emotional therapy.

“It was obvious for the last three weeks,” one source said. “He was very depressed and unhappy, yet there was no special effort to help him--no medical assistance, no psychological treatment, nothing.”

Soon after the breakup, he began making new demands to be left alone, maintaining he needed time to adjust to American freedom.

In what one official called an “unconscionable” act, his CIA guards repeatedly left Yurchenko alone, despite fears that his life was in danger.

In one instance, Yurchenko demanded to enter a bowling alley alone, supposedly to pick up applications for league play. He returned after 15 minutes clutching brochures, but “what he was doing . . . was getting in touch with the Soviets to negotiate for his return,” one source said.

Sudden Interest in Bowling

“The guy’s a senior KGB officer and says he wants to disappear to join a bowling league, and the guys with him didn’t think it was strange,” one official said.

On his final evening in CIA custody, Yurchenko chose the Georgetown restaurant from which he made his escape.

Presented with an account of those lapses, Reagan is said to be considering a full-scale probe of “the whole Yurchenko business.” The investigation could center on the CIA’s National Collection Division, which supervises the debriefing and resettlement of political defectors.

The CIA release said that Yurchenko, 49, had made a 27-year rise in the ranks that began with a 1958 commission in the Soviet navy. He later served in KGB posts including Alexandria, Egypt, and Washington. He served until last April as a counterintelligence chief in Moscow in the KGB’s First Department, searching for leaks and counterspies and handling defectors to the Soviet Union, including famed British double agent Kim Philby.

Maura Dolan contributed to this story from Ottawa.