Missing Russian Diplomat Is in U.S. and ‘Fine,’ American Official Says

Sergei Tretyakov, a Russian diplomat, knows that the Cold War is over. But when his five-year term at the Russian mission to the United Nations ended, Tretyakov didn’t want to go home. In October, he wrapped up his assignment, the mission withdrew him from the U.N. rolls, and he prepared to fly back to Moscow.

And then he disappeared.

After he failed to show up in Russia, the Russian Foreign Ministry had to ask the U.S. State Department if it had seen the missing diplomat.

“We were able to say, ‘He’s fine and he’s in the U.S., and that’s all we’re able to say,’ ” a U.S. official said this week.

Tretyakov, 44, who held a mid-level post at the mission, is the first Russian diplomat to defect since 1978.

The defection comes at a time when the U.S. and Russia are no longer ideological archenemies. The U.S. allows foreigners on its soil or at a border point to seek political asylum if they fear persecution at home.

“ ‘Defection’ is a literary term, a political term,” said Ross Bergeron, the spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which handles asylum requests. “It’s a term more related to espionage than it is a legal term.”

Indeed, some diplomats at the U.N. say they never encountered Tretyakov in the course of normal duties during which they would expect to meet someone in his position, and others believe that he was a member of Russia’s intelligence service.

In Russia, newspapers have made similar surmises. Some have even posited that he was a double agent, working for the CIA as well as the Russians, and that he was about to be exposed. But the Vremya Novostei newspaper had a more mundane scenario: Tretyakov just wanted to stay in the United States but wouldn’t have qualified for a green card.

Soon after the Russians discovered that Tretyakov was missing, they asked the U.S. to arrange a meeting with him but so far have been rebuffed.

“We do not have any information as to his whereabouts or his condition,” said Kirill Speransky, spokesman for the Russian mission. “Did he leave by his own choice? What were the circumstances? That’s what we would like to know.”

Although international law dictates that individuals who have been arrested in a foreign country have the right to meet with consular officials from their home countries, there is no legal obligation in the case of a defection.

“If he doesn’t want to see them, he doesn’t have to,” the U.S. official said. “It’s a free country, as we say.”

Neither the Russian nor the U.S. side would comment on what exactly Tretyakov did at the Russian mission, or his grounds for believing that he would be at risk if he returned to Moscow. But the U.S. official said, “If the Russians thought he told us everything about the workings of their mission, he certainly would be under a cloud at home.”

Tretyakov is the second Russian to defect since the end of the Cold War in 1989. A correspondent for the Itar-Tass news agency defected while working in Washington in 1992, with information about an electronic spy network in Cuba that fed information to Russia--including intercepted battle plans for the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

In 1978, a top Soviet diplomat, Arkady Shevchenko, defected to the United States after spying for the CIA for more than 2 1/2 years. He first approached the U.S. about switching sides in 1975, while he was an undersecretary-general at the United Nations. He delivered secrets to the U.S. that included a position paper from negotiations to reduce U.S. and Russian arsenals of long-range nuclear warheads.

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Times staff writer Maura Reynolds in Moscow contributed to this report.