KGB Chief Says Defector, Born in Indiana, Was Recruited While in Navy

KGB chief Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, attempting to lift some of the mystery around the death of a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who defected to the Soviet Union, said Wednesday that the man had been recruited as a Soviet agent early in his naval career and had gone on to become one of Moscow’s best operatives.

Kryuchkov, speaking to Western journalists between sessions of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, said that Glenn Michael Souther had worked for the KGB for a number of years while serving in the U.S. Navy and then in the Naval Reserve before publicly defecting to Moscow last July.

‘We Have Our Spies . . . ‘

“We can be quite open about this,” Kryuchkov said. “We have our spies, and you have yours.”

Kryuchkov confirmed that Souther, 32, committed suicide last Thursday and was buried Monday in western Moscow with full military honors as a major in the KGB, the Soviet state security and intelligence service. His parents, brother and sister came from Hammond, Ind., for the funeral, Kryuchkov added.

“His nervous system could not stand the pressure,” Kryuchkov said of Souther. “This was a tragic thing. The motive was not political.

“He had long displayed a nervous state of mind. He was a very gifted, emotional, caring, sensitive person, and he could be easily hurt. We cannot blame anyone for his death.”

Kryuchkov effectively dismissed the possibility, suggested by the way that Souther’s unusual and prominent obituary was phrased in the military newspaper Red Star on Tuesday, that he had been a Soviet agent infiltrated--perhaps as a teen-ager--into the United States in order to enter the U.S. intelligence services.

“He was an American, born in Indiana,” Kryuchkov said. “Don’t give us too much credit.”

Souther had taken the Russian name Mikhail Yevgenyevich Orlov when he arrived here, Kryuchkov said, to help him integrate better into Soviet society. He married a Russian woman with whom he had a daughter, now 18 months old.

Wife Tipped FBI

He was divorced from an American wife with whom he had a son, now about 12 years old. The wife had tipped the FBI in December, 1982, that he might be a spy.

Souther had left a note, Kryuchkov said, thanking the KGB and the Soviet government for what they had done for him. The KGB chief did not disclose the full circumstances of Souther’s death.

Kryuchkov, relaxed and affable as he spoke with correspondents, seemed intent on placing the complex espionage case--one of the more sensational in recent years--in perspective. He emphasized that Souther had worked for the KGB for a number of years and and that he had come to the Soviet intelligence service as a result of his political convictions.

‘Great Personal Loss’

“I must also say that it was a great personal loss,” the KGB chief said of the suicide. “I had met him several times.”

Souther’s official obituary on Tuesday said that he had, “for a long time, performed important special missions and had made a larger contribution to ensuring Soviet state security.”

Souther, who enlisted in the Navy in January, 1975, at the age of 18, said in interviews that he gave here a year ago that he had been revolted by what he said he learned of U.S. policies while serving as an intelligence analyst with the U.S. 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean. He left active duty eight years later as a petty officer first class with extensive experience in analyzing intelligence.

“There he comprehended the real danger of the nuclear threat, which pushed him into the fight against it in the ranks of Soviet intelligence,” the government newspaper Izvestia said of his service in the Middle East.

Souther’s views further coalesced, Izvestia said, while he attended Old Dominion University in Virginia, where he studied the Russian language and literature and Soviet affairs, and worked part time in the Naval Intelligence Center at Norfolk, Va., with the intention of becoming a Navy officer.

Souther had special security clearances to work with top-secret data, including photographs taken from U.S. reconnaissance satellites, and he was actively sought by the FBI and Naval Intelligence after his initial disappearance and then again last summer, about the time he appeared in Moscow.

Agents’ Suspicions

His worries over the possibility of a nuclear war led to an “internal breakup” shortly before he finished his studies at Old Dominion, Izvestia said, suggesting that this, as much as the suspicions of counterintelligence agents from the FBI, led to his abrupt disappearance from Virginia in May, 1986.

At KGB headquarters, a spokesman said the decision to announce Souther’s death resulted from the organization’s new commitment to glasnost , or political openness, and he recalled a decision announced by Kryuchkov last month to “keep the public better informed about our work . . . to report major and important operations conducted by our services.”

FOUR RECENT DEFECTIONS There have been a relatively small number of Americans who left the United States to live in the Soviet Union. Here are four cases: 1988--Theodore Branch, 43, and his wife, Cheryl, turned their backs on life in Erie, Pa., in the belief that communism could give them a better life. On Jan. 20, they received permission to live in the Soviet Union. The Branches had gone to Moscow as tourists and did not want to return home, Soviet officials said. The pair, both unemployed at the time, had worked in radio.

1987--Army Pvt. Wade E. Roberts of San Bernardino fled his unit in West Germany and turned up in the Soviet Union. He later decided to return to the West to face charges of being absent without leave. Roberts was convicted in February, 1988, and given a bad conduct discharge.

1986--Scientist Arnold F. Lockshin defected with his wife, Lauren, and their three children in October. The Houston-based cancer researcher, who is now 49, cited political persecution as the reason. Two months later he was given the top post at a cancer research center in Moscow.

1985--Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA employee, disappeared from his home in Santa Fe, N.M., when the FBI was about to arrest him on suspicion of spying. In August, 1986, he appeared on Soviet television saying he had been granted political asylum.