CIA Reportedly Ignored Yurchenko Depression : Care and Coddling of Defectors Criticized

In the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis 23 years ago, a former CIA official recalled this week, American agents stayed up all night in Mexico City drinking with a nervous Cuban spy, nudging and nursing him to the brink of defection.

The next morning, on the way to an airplane bound for America, the spy leaped from their automobile and vanished into traffic. “Two weeks later, I found out he’d been shot,” the agent said.

As that grim episode illustrates, the care and coddling of Communist Bloc defectors has long been a risky game. Yet the bizarre case of KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko, who last week gave up American exile for an uncertain return to the Soviet Union, is stirring uneasy fears among intelligence experts that the CIA’s time-tested techniques for nurturing defectors have somehow gone disastrously awry.

‘Unforgivable Mistake’

One former CIA official declared last week that the agency committed an “unforgivable tactical mistake” in its handling of Yurchenko, who walked away from his CIA case officer in a busy Washington restaurant and headed for the Soviet Embassy.

Another, noting the wide access to the outside world apparently given the KGB’s reputed No. 5 officer, called the CIA’s casualness “kind of astonishing.”

To those experts and others, the Yurchenko debacle painfully highlights the failings of a CIA defector program that they contend is poorly organized, badly funded and regarded within the agency itself as a dumping ground for CIA underachievers.

“The people in charge at the agency look on these cases on a short-term basis as exciting, new and important information. And then it becomes a handling problem, and you often hand it off to people who are very indifferent,” said Donald Jameson, who helped debrief East Bloc defectors for 21 years until he retired from the CIA in 1973.

“It’s perfectly true that a lot of people who never should have been handling defectors have been handling them from time to time.”

Such grumbling in part reflects yawning divisions among both current and former CIA officials over the preferred ways to deal with Communist defectors--described by one former agent as “emotional suicides” who often suffer during their political and ideological rebirths in the West.

The strains of betrayal make re-defections “a very normal thing,” argued William E. Colby, CIA director during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Indeed, at least half a dozen politically important defectors--from Soviet journalist Oleg Bitov, who deserted in London last year, to Svetlana Alliluyeva, Josef Stalin’s daughter--have returned to their homelands in the last decade.

But there is evidence that even some high-level CIA officials are now concerned. Shortly before Yurchenko turned up in Soviet custody, claiming he had been kidnaped in Italy and later drugged in a Virginia “safehouse,” some CIA officials already had suggested that the care and feeding of defectors be transferred to the U.S. Marshals Service, which provides new identities, living arrangements and even cash for endangered witnesses and informants in criminal cases.

Some say the suggestion, which has yet to become a formal proposal, makes sense. Although most of the 4,000 federal witnesses who have been in the program have criminal pasts--while defectors usually do not have such backgrounds--one law enforcement official said that caring for them is not that different.

The first year is “the most traumatic,” he said, “with guilt pangs and the need for extra-special attention.”

If Vitaly Yurchenko were indeed the real thing--and not a Soviet double agent, as some experts believe--hindsight indicates that his CIA handlers failed most in neglecting longtime rules of thumb for getting defectors through that first year.

Two-Step Process

Each of the 10 or so high-level defectors who fall into CIA hands in an average year is attended to by the CIA’s National Collection Division, which runs a two-step process to extract information from the converts and help them adjust to new American lives.

The information-extraction and dispensing of initial aid and comfort fall to CIA debriefers, case officers who establish themselves as the defectors’ friends and confidants and evaluate their knowledge and emotional state. Debriefing can take years but generally lasts a few months, ex-CIA officials say.

In the second step, called “resettlement,” a CIA committee oversees defectors’ adjustment to society, helping them find jobs, buy houses and perhaps establish new identities elsewhere.

Debriefing is the most critical and difficult step, in part because virtually all defectors are mentally overwhelmed and exhausted by the time they decide to join their former enemy’s ranks.

‘Squeezed Orange’

“He becomes sort of like a squeezed orange,” said one senior Administration official with extensive intelligence knowledge. “He comes across, and has the rather quick satisfaction of venting his spleen, and when his usefulness is completed, he probably looks around and says, ‘Omigod, what happened?’ ”

“With defectors, you’ve got to remember that the man you’re talking to has just committed emotional suicide,” said David Phillips, a retired CIA officer, author and head of an association of former intelligence agents. “It doesn’t matter what his motives are. He’s betrayed his country. He’s probably a very sick man, and will be for a long, long time.”

The cure for that sickness has long been a poultice of isolation and freedom, authority and friendliness. Although no formal debriefing guidelines exist, what one former agent calls “a pretty good institutional memory” prescribes that defectors be shielded as much as is practical from the outside world, and that they remain close to a sympathetic debriefer until their emotions have stabilized.

The relative isolation prevents defectors from reading too much about their home countries, stirring old memories, and supposedly deprives them of grist for made-up spy stories to satisfy the appetites of their CIA interviewers.

Such duties are anything but easy. A good intelligence debriefer, one White House expert said, can “milk a defector completely dry. That takes time, and it’s usually not a happy process.”

Confidence, Authority

“It’s a relationship that, to be successful, has to combine the inspiration of both confidence and authority,” Jameson said. “Most Russians, particularly, are trained to respond to bosses--it’s something that antedates the (Bolshevik) Revolution. . . . Even though they may come out for the freedom, they need to have that figure of authority. And we’re often not too good at supplying it.”

Ex-CIA officers and other intelligence experts say the evidence suggests that Yurchenko’s debriefers exercised little of the control they say is vital to bringing a defector through his or her first months of emotional trauma.

Yurchenko’s personal history--he gambled away a 25-year KGB career, a wife and two children in the Soviet Union and a mistress in Montreal--contained all the elements of emotional distress. Administration sources say he was known to fear retaliation from his old superiors, but he also was familiar enough with the Soviets’ handling of re-defectors to believe that he could bargain his way back into good graces if his American hiatus did not work out.

Despite those red flags, Yurchenko was allowed to travel to Canada, to read newspaper articles about his new celebrity status, to receive mail from a newspaper reporter and perhaps even to talk by telephone to his son in Moscow.

‘Kind of Astonishing’

“The old-school guys never would have dreamed of passing over letters from a newspaper reporter,” Phillips said. “Really, to some of us, that’s kind of astonishing.”

He also was left unaccompanied for long periods of time and was unable to speak to most of his CIA handlers in his native Russian. Most incredible to some experts is that Yurchenko escaped not by leaping from an automobile, or even evading his guards, but by walking unopposed out of a crowded Georgetown restaurant on a rainy Saturday night.

“The single most glaring thing--that I can find no extenuating circumstances for--is taking a guy to a restaurant so close to the Soviet Embassy,” said Jameson. “That was an unforgivable tactical mistake.

“What shocks a lot of us is the question of security--or, rather, the lack of it,” said one law enforcement official who dealt with the CIA on both Yurchenko and other defector cases.

One independent expert, Roy G. Godson, chairman of Georgetown University’s Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, said is it clear “that things weren’t handled well” in the Yurchenko case.

“I certainly hope that out of the counterintelligence deficiencies that a consensus will emerge for serious . . . reform,” he said, “not just throwing money at the problem.” Godson said the official Soviet population in America should be reduced and U.S. security and counterintelligence measures stepped up.

‘Comparatively Weak’

California Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Riverside), a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, said the CIA’s “analytical capabilities (are) comparatively weak.”

“That shows up in a situation like this,” Brown said in an interview. “A sound analysis of the defector process would have led to a more sophisticated handling of Yurchenko.”

But others say the affair points to a failure of the entire system for handling defectors, not merely an isolated flaw that led to the loss of a major prize.

Former intelligence officers and others say the debriefer’s job is regarded within the agency as “baby-sitting,” a dead-end task, and often shunned by those most qualified to perform it. Emotional problems aside, defectors are described as often not a pleasant lot, and many agents find it a strain to provide the constant ego-boosting that they require.

Period of Bitterness

“At first, they’re sort of a coup--you look forward to them. Every session you expect something vital. But as you enter into the second period of remorse, of bitterness, doubt, the morale problems come to the fore,” a senior White House official said. “I gather that if there were shortcomings in the way this man was handled, they were in this area.”

“The agency needs a heavy dose of human relations,” said the law enforcement official who is familiar with Yurchenko’s case and others. “From what is known now, there is a real question of whether those working with the KGB official were sufficiently alert to indications of depressions or changes of mind.”

One Administration official said the defection obviously “turned into an emotional crisis for him,” adding, “Even KGB thugs have emotions.”

One source familiar with the CIA’s handling of defectors said “a lot . . . are just outraged by the way they are treated.”

“The settlement guys stay with them. The debriefers come from different parts of the agency to talk with them. I’ve never met a settlement guy who spoke Russian. I’ve never met one who had any real training, either. They say they kind of get it on the job.”

Stories by Communist defectors who stayed in the United States suggest that the CIA resettlers often are no more expert than the debriefers appear to be. According to intelligence experts and public accounts, highly trained Soviets and other converts have been advised by the CIA to take jobs as dishwashers, secretaries and restaurant waitresses.

“The resettlers are not very adept, but they play more of a role (than debriefers),” said Jameson. “One of the problems in the system is that the dichotomy (between debriefers and resettlers) tends to make people think of one or the other instead of the man as a whole.

“What really ought to happen is that there should be one person in charge of the whole process. You don’t get a good resettlement unless there’s someone on a very high level who makes it happen.”

On Capitol Hill, reaction to the Yurchenko affair during the week ranged from outrage at what some called the CIA’s ineptitude to sympathy for what others termed the agency’s bad luck.

Some of the criticism centered on CIA Director William J. Casey. Saying “we have suffered a major propaganda defeat,” House Intelligence Committee member Brown asserted that “Casey has to bear most of the responsibility as the head of the agency, and as someone who met repeatedly with Yurchenko.

“As smart as Casey is,” Brown added, “you’d think he would have detected that Yurchenko had emotional problems, if he did have them, or alternatively, that he was not a bona fide defector. In either case, that should have been detected.”

But another California member of the House committee, Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Los Angeles), declined to criticize the agency.

“I don’t like to second-guess the CIA,” he said. “Maybe they should have handled the situation differently, but who am I to say that? . . . Perhaps they had the kind of bad luck that even with hindsight could not have been avoided.”

Contributing to this article were Times staff writers Ronald J. Ostrow, Doyle McManus, Robert L. Jackson and James Gerstenzang.