COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Lies Carry More Profit for Defectors : Old allegations by the discredited Col. Yurchenko surface to harm a reporter.

A useful operating principle for journal ists is that defectors should never be believed and that secret police are by definition untrustworthy. I would allow no national partiality in the application of these rules, but let’s confine ourselves for the moment to the KGB.

On Aug. 1, 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, a colonel in the KGB, walked into the U.S. Embassy in Rome. Flown to Virginia for interrogation by the CIA, Yurchenko imparted many tantalizing stories, including one about an American correspondent.

The KGB man said that he had heard from KGB colleagues that in late 1984 or early 1985, the correspondent had accepted $1,000 from a KGB officer. That Yurchenko knew so little about the alleged incident suggests that it was in the nature of thirdhand gossip.

The correspondent in question was Dusko Doder of the Washington Post. FBI director William Webster told Post editor Ben Bradlee of the allegation. The Post conducted its own inquiry and satisfied itself that Doder was innocent. Bradlee says that Webster personally assured him in 1986 that the FBI had come to the same conclusion, as had the CIA.

At the end of last year, Time magazine resurrected Yurchenko’s old tidbit and ran a two-page story heavily freighted with innuendo about Doder. Time glided over some highly relevant facts. For instance, three months after his defection, Yurchenko redefected to the Soviet Union. Also scanted in Time’s story was Doder’s standing with the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The officials, including U.S. Ambassador Arthur Hartman, who suggested to Time that Doder might have been spoon-fed by the KGB, had good reason to dislike Doder, an excellent journalist who regularly exposed their own ignorance.

Doder, now reporting from Belgrade, has not lacked defenders. No less than 40 active or former U.S. correspondents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe signed a protest letter to Time concluding with these words: “By drawing dark and dire implications about Doder without providing a shred of proof to substantiate them, Time has exposed all of us--including its own reporters--to similar smears based on rumors, raw police files and questionable informants.”

Last October, Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, chairman of the Russian government’s military intelligence archives, declared that a search of Russian files indicated that Alger Hiss had never been a spy for the Soviet Union. Hiss, now 87, said he had been vindicated and his supporters cheered. Those with an interest in maintaining his guilt questioned the propriety of believing any Russian intelligence man.

Last March, a retired KGB general, Oleg Kalugin, referred to “an agent--a well-known American journalist” who was so angered by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that “he said he would never again take any money from us.” Right-wingers here identified the agent as the late I.F. Stone and crowed that it proved what they’d been saying all along about this distinguished radical muckraker.

Then Kalugin said his original account had been the target of “malicious misinterpretation.” Stone had never been an agent. The reference to money concerned Stone’s refusal to let Kalugin, then a press officer in the Soviet embassy, buy him lunch. Now it was the left’s turn to crow, while the right held that Kalugin II, as opposed to Kalugin I, was not to be believed.

Secret police, spies and defectors make things up. It’s in their nature and their calling. In “Ropes of Sand,” a memoir about his years as a CIA officer in the Middle East, Wilbur Crane Eveland described how he regularly invented agents he had supposedly recruited. It enhanced his standing with his bosses.

Having invented an agent, you can demand money to pay him. We could even suppose that a KGB man assigned to dangle money in front of Doder, thus compromising him, instead pocketed it.

One final cautionary story about defectors. Gen. Jan Sejna of Czech military intelligence defected to the United States in 1968. As his store of disclosures diminished, the CIA interrogators began to feel he was making things up. They invented a secret Soviet master plan to subvert world order via the KGB’s Fifth Directorate. Had Sejna know of this? Yes, indeed, said Sejna.

The CIA then cut Sejna loose, without telling him why. He began to spread the Section V terror scenario. As Reagan’s ideologues stoked up the Cold War, they invoked it frequently. Eventually, for political reasons, the CIA confirmed as true the bogus scenario they had invented a few years earlier. And last year, as the MIA issue grew hotter, Sejna suddenly announced that yes, as an intelligence officer in Prague, he had been aware that U.S. prisoners of war were being remitted from Vietnam to the Soviet Union.