DEFECTORS: DEATH & LIFE : INEPT HANDLERS CREATE MORE PERILS FOR ALREADY DESPERATE PEOPLE

The Moscow suicide of former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Glenn Michael Souther last month only confirmed what CIA defector-handlers have been saying for years--that switching sides is an act of personal desperation and the landing is rarely soft. Souther’s story is sad but typical: First he sold secrets to the Soviets, then he panicked three years ago when an FBI interrogation convinced him the spy-hunters were closing in. The Soviets seem to have handled his escape with professional skill, but bungled the follow-up--the delicate task of creating a new “home” for a man who left everything behind.

If Souther’s suicide was really a suicide--probable but not certain--his KGB handlers have doubtless been called on the carpet for the sort of grilling that would have once led to Siberia.

Their CIA counterparts would be sympathetic. In the 40 years they have been recruiting, debriefing and resettling Soviet defectors, they have learned the hard way that the political and intelligence officials who show up on Western doorsteps are often unstable personalities, going through something akin to a nervous breakdown. Often defectors have changed their minds and gone home--but none more publicly than KGB officer Vitaly S. Yurchenko, who held a Washington press conference in 1985 to announce his second thoughts. More recently, KGB Col. Viktor P. Gundarev, who defected in February, 1986, contacted writer David Wise to complain of insensitive and sometimes highhanded treatment by the CIA. The agency has denied the charges but a congressional hearing has been promised.

CIA officers who have handled defectors say no two cases are the same, but most have certain common characteristics. Perhaps most important: Virtually all are “walk-ins”--Soviet Bloc officials who contact Western governments to volunteer their services. Almost all important defectors have simply showed up to sell secrets or plead for asylum. In most cases, the motive is a personal crisis--a failing marriage, heavy debts, professional disappointments, even fear of arrest. This despite the fact that CIA stations worldwide devote much time to gathering information about East Bloc officials who might be recruited--building up huge files on potential candidates.

Standard CIA procedure is to attempt to persuade the volunteer to return home and work as a spy for a time in return for a promise of future resettlement. Sometimes it works, more often not.

Once a volunteer has been accepted as a defector the personal crisis deepens. Within a day or two the defector realizes he can change his mind only at the risk of his life; friends and family are left behind;, the people handling him are strangers; he feels totally alone. Sensitive handling is critical, just as it will be later, when the defector has been pumped of all immediately useful information and begins to lose his luster. What defectors need at both junctures are friendly faces that do not change too frequently, familiar food and surroundings, reassurance they will be protected from the long arm of the KGB and confidence they are not going to be set adrift on the alien ocean of America.

Defectors generally say that few things are more important than hearing and speaking their own language. In its early days, the CIA had plenty of native Russian-speakers, but they have long-since died or retired. The agency is now hard put to find fluent Russian linguists.

The CIA has handled scores of defectors more or less successfully--but sometimes it all goes wrong. The case of Yurchenko is an administrative and human horror story from start to finish. Yurchenko complained when debriefings were conducted in English, emphasizing his feeling of dislocation. His questioners pumped him relentlessly for operational detail, and then fanned his personal fears by passing on his still-warm secrets to the press. Loneliness increased after an affair collapsed when his lover refused to join him in exile. He began to miss his daughter and adopted son in Moscow. None of this seems to have been picked up by his CIA handlers.

Yurchenko’s three-page biography, released by the CIA after his embarrassing redefection, suggests he was genuine, not an agent dispatched to muddy the waters as some claimed. Questions of allegiance are difficult to answer, but it seems the CIA squandered an important source of information by its failure to hold Yurchenko’s hand through an agonizing period of psychological adjustment that can seem like dying.

One chronic weakness of agency handling has been its appetite for operational details--especially nuggets of hard counterintelligence information with the average life-span of a black fly. Agency handlers well know that a pell-mell damage assessment will begin as soon as a defector is missed. If investigators don’t move quickly they will find the scene swept clean and suspects whisked off before the Black Maria can arrive. But the U.S. government has a voracious appetite for personal information about their shadowy opponents and the CIA debriefers lose no time in passing on gossip about the Soviets and their allies.

Anyone who has talked to defectors will remember initial puzzlement at the weirdly detailed stories of human failings and bureaucratic infighting behind the Iron Curtain. This compulsive retailing of scandal is a kind of debriefing shell shock. Defectors are only human; they quickly learn that Washington ears prick up at the first breath of venal or sexual intrigue. Yet most defectors resent that initial punishing period of long days when teams of debriefers drag out every last detail. The unhappy defector is at least the center of attention while being sucked dry. Worse is the arrival of the clerical drones to tidy the paper work--a sure sign the intelligence professionals have lost interest. At that point the promise of meaningful work is what defectors need, but rarely get.

The criticism of CIA defector-handling sparked by the Yurchenko case, and revived by Gundarev’s complaints, is only the latest appearance of an old problem dating back to the earliest days of Western relations with the Soviet regime.

No nation has ever had more defectors over a longer period of time than the Soviet Union--and the rest of the world has never depended more heavily on defectors for important information about an opponent. Secrecy was clamped down immediately after the 1917 October Revolution; Soviet borders were all but sealed to emigration by the end of the 1920s, and the Soviet population was effectively cut off from contact with foreigners inside the country by the purges of the 1930s. The result was the world’s first modern totalitarian society--opaque and conspiratorial. Outsiders had only two sources of information: passive clues such as the lineup of leaders during May Day parades and the testimony of defectors. One of the first was Boris Bajanov, who had been Josef Stalin’s personal secretary in the early 1920s, closely followed by Georges Agabekov, the OGPU agent in charge of the hunt for Bajanov.

Much important Soviet history is still known only from the reports of defectors--but Western analysts and intelligence officers were slow to learn how to exploit it. Two defectors from the NKVD of the 1930s, Walter Krivitsky and Alexander Orlov, provided much of what the West knows about Stalin’s conduct of the purges. But neither was systematically debriefed by U.S. intelligence organizations. The FBI first learned of Krivitsky after his memoirs ran in the Saturday Evening Post in 1939. They had still not questioned him when he was found dead in a hotel room two years later, an apparent suicide. Orlov defected in 1938, but entered the United States secretly and remained in hiding until 1953. Some CIA officers valued what Orlov could tell them but most of them thought it ancient history.

Defectors continued to be an important source of information about Soviet politics and leaders after World War II, and the Soviets took extraordinary measures to prevent their escape. In one celebrated case of the early 1950s, teams of CIA and KGB officers tore a Vienna restaurant apart in their battle over a Soviet diplomat who could not make up his mind to flee or to stay.

On other occasions the Soviets have snatched would-be defectors from under the noses of Western intelligence officers. But it rarely comes to that. The first line of Soviet defense has been the isolation of citizens and officials. Diplomats abroad live in supervised compounds; their older children are educated in the Soviet Union where they serve in effect as hostages. Official delegations are routinely accompanied by KGB guards who read the roll call morning, noon and night. When defectors manage to slip through the net, the Soviets try to lure them back, promising forgiveness and arranging for tearful phone calls with relatives.

But successful escape in the past did not end Soviet interest. Those who made it safely knew the KGB’s memory was long--over the years many have been murdered or kidnaped or died mysteriously. In the early 1970s, a Russian emigre organization in West Germany obtained a KGB wanted list that included names and descriptions of about 470 defectors between 1945 and 1969, many under sentence of death for illegal departure. This document was used as the basis for a study of Soviet defectors by Vladimir Krasnov, who fled a Soviet tour group in 1962 and is now a professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California.

In “Soviet Defectors,” Krasnov found that defections offered a barometer of the quality of Soviet life. Russians were unhappiest, and most likely to defect, during the rigors of the Stalinist period. When life opened up, as it did under Nikita S. Khrushchev, defections dropped.

Krasnov’s book was completed before Mikhail S. Gorbachev began his reformation of Soviet society. But if the past is any guide, then the defection of ordinary Soviet citizens to the West has probably fallen off--it is easier to leave legally, and not so many want to go. Gorbachev’s most important break with Soviet custom has been his willingness to risk glasnost --a combination of open politics, free discussion and telling the truth about the Soviet past. But some observers suspect that Gorbachev is saying one thing in public and another in the Politburo. If this should be true, then a defector will probably be first to bring the news.