Yurchenko Ridicules, Assails CIA, Charges It Invented ‘Lover’ Story

KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko ridiculed and condemned the CIA on Thursday and said CIA agents tried to intercept him at the gates of the Soviet Embassy the night he escaped from his guard.

Yurchenko, leading a pre-summit Soviet chorus of accusations that the United States is guilty of “state terrorism” against him, said the CIA had fabricated a story that he decided to return home only after his mistress in Canada spurned his proposal that she defect and join him.

Yurchenko, who said last week that he had been kidnaped and tortured by the CIA, was the star of a Moscow news conference that added fresh details to his sensational account.

Western diplomats said the timing of the news conference--five days before President Reagan is to meet Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Geneva--is not a good omen for success at the summit, the first between the superpowers in six years.

Yurchenko’s allegations were broadcast on television during prime time here and seemed designed to support Soviet contentions that the United States violated his human rights.

Mocks CIA Director

While Soviet journalists roared with approving laughter, Yurchenko mocked CIA Director William J. Casey as an “old man . . . with his trousers unbuttoned” who was his host at a dinner in CIA headquarters.

He was told by one CIA agent that he might meet Reagan, but this was not mentioned again after he complained to Casey that he was being treated like an animal in CIA hands, Yurchenko said.

Although he repeated charges he had made at a news conference in Washington on Nov. 4 that he was drugged and tormented by the CIA, Yurchenko also described how his alleged captors made him play golf and let him eat in expensive restaurants where he always picked up the tab.

He said he escaped simply by running away from a tender-hearted CIA escort who left him unguarded in a French restaurant in Washington.

Earlier, he said he managed to alert the Soviet Embassy by telephone that he would try to go there. He made the call, he said, when he was momentarily left alone by his young CIA guard--whom he identified as Tom Hannah--during a shopping trip to a department store in Manassas, Va.

Escape from Restaurant

The night of his escape, he said, Hannah took him to a French restaurant in the Georgetown district of Washington only half a mile from the Soviet housing compound. When the young escort went to the men’s room, Yurchenko said, he ran out a back street and made his way to the compound.

At the compound, Yurchenko said, “I saw cars parked and knew they (the CIA) were waiting for me. . . . Some people were walking by, and I started asking them questions. I opened my umbrella so they could not see my whiskers and got into the embassy.”

Yurchenko, who described himself as nervous and jittery, showed resentment at questions about his relationship with the wife of a Soviet diplomat in Canada.

American reporters “are writing about me as if I were a sexual gangster,” he said angrily. “Please don’t believe these blatant lies.” He charged that the “lies” were fabricated by the CIA to hide its incompetence.

Asked if he knew Valentina Yereskovsky, the wife of the Soviet consul general in Montreal and the woman intelligence officials have identified as his longtime mistress, Yurchenko at first replied: “That is a highly private matter.”

But he acknowledged that he knew her and her husband when they were all assigned to the Soviet Embassy in Washington in the late 1970s. Yurchenko was assigned to the embassy from 1975 to 1980.

Without being asked about reports from Reagan Administration sources that he decided to return to the Soviet Union after a disastrous Canadian rendezvous with her arranged by the CIA, Yurchenko volunteered: “During my stay in the United, States, I never went to Canada. . . . If I was taken there, I was in a state when I could not control myself. . . . I do not know.

“The story of the woman in Canada was invented by the CIA to compromise me,” he declared. “It was their last slim chance of compromising me because their earlier efforts failed.”

Yurchenko also turned dramatically on several American reporters who asked him questions, accusing them of working for the CIA.

A tall man with a handlebar mustache and thinning blond hair, Yurchenko mixed his denunciations of the United States with comic vignettes.

He said he was taken to a CIA-patronized medical clinic on New Mexico Avenue in the northwest part of Washington, disguised in a white-haired wig, false eyebrows and a pair of glasses.

Presented as Millionaire

“I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize myself,” he said, adding that he was presented as a Swiss millionaire by the name of Friedrich S. Hoffman.

Yurchenko charged that, while held by the CIA, he was pumped full of drugs and sometimes felt “blissful” and at other times wanted to hit someone or jump out of a window.

When he met Casey, he said, the CIA director took a pill before dinner.

“I began to think, ‘Is he also on drugs?’ ” Yurchenko said with a smile as Soviet journalists rocked with laughter.

When the CIA director described “big plans” for Yurchenko that would help undermine communism, he added, he gave a neutral reply.

Later, however, he said he protested, “You downgraded me to the state of an animal.” According to Yurchenko, “Casey went pale. . . . The dinner was ruined.”

Flanked by Lawyer, Doctor

Yurchenko was flanked by a lawyer, Vladimir N. Kudryatsev, vice chairman of the Soviet Assn. of Jurists, and Dr. Nikolai M. Zharekov, director of the psychiatric faculty of Moscow’s First Medical Institute.

Kudryatsev solemnly concluded on the basis of Yurchenko’s allegations that the United States had violated international law, U.S. law and the Vienna Convention on Treatment of Diplomats.

Refusing to say whether he worked for the KGB, Yurchenko said he held the rank of minister-counselor with the Soviet Foreign Ministry, adding: “You don’t have to believe me, but that’s a fact.”

The Soviet doctor said Yurchenko’s description of his experience corresponds to the symptoms of someone who had been given psychotropic drugs. Laboratory tests, Zharekov added, are “still being processed.” But Yurchenko now has “low intellectual functions, . . . emotional instability, excessive tears and discoordination of motor functions,” the doctor added, symptoms that he said are further evidence of drugging.