Double Defecting KGB Colonel Resumes Intelligence Work, Moscow Paper Says

Double defector Vitaly Yurchenko, the KGB colonel who exposed a former CIA operative as a spy for the Soviet intelligence agency before redefecting to Moscow last year, has resumed his work in Soviet intelligence, a Moscow newspaper said Saturday.

The Moscow Communist Party newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda carried a full-page interview with Yurchenko, previously reported by some Western media as having been executed in March following his return to the Soviet Union.

The Moskovskaya Pravda story, however, carried no pictures of Yurchenko.

In the story, Yurchenko repeated his claims that he was kidnaped and tortured by the CIA after he defected last year. He said the American agency tried to use him to implicate Bulgaria and the Soviet Union in the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.

“The Western media were spreading all sorts of cock-and-bull stories about me. As you see, I am alive and well, and their reports do not correspond to fact. My health has improved. In December, 1985, and in January, 1986, I underwent a course of treatment, then I was given some time for rest and in March I returned to my old job,” Yurchenko said.

His old job was deputy chief of the KGB office in charge of spy operations in the United States and Canada.

Yurchenko, one of the highest-ranking Soviet intelligence operatives to come to the West, defected in Rome in August, 1985, and was taken to the United States and interviewed by CIA director William J. Casey and other officials.

But after three months of interrogation in a Washington suburb, he walked out of a Georgetown restaurant and into the Soviet Embassy, claiming he had been kidnaped and drugged by the CIA and forced to play golf to make him look fit.

During his interrogation in the United States, Yurchenko fingered dismissed CIA agent Edward L. Howard as a spy for the KGB.

Howard, the first Soviet mole found within the CIA itself, was placed under surveillance in New Mexico but slipped his FBI guard last September and fled before he could be arrested.

On Thursday, Howard was granted political asylum in the Soviet Union, ending a yearlong manhunt by the FBI and CIA. American officials have said Howard almost single-handedly wiped out U.S. spying operations in Moscow.

Yurchenko did not mention Howard in the interview, but claimed the CIA tried to force him to admit KGB involvement in the wounding of the Pope.

“They wanted to make me give false testimony at the Rome trial of the Bulgarians charged in the plot,” he said.