The Amazing Story of the Russian Defector Who Changed his Mind
The home phone of law enforcement agency agent archangel Rochford rang within the middle of the night on August two, 1985. He grabbed it and detected the voice of his law enforcement agency supervisor. “There’s a plane returning in, a high-level deserter.” The day before, a Soviet man had walked into the United States of America diplomatic building in Rome. He had told yank officers he was a commissioned military officer within the KGB and wished to defect to the u. s.. the person secure to reveal Soviet secrets in exchange for a replacement life within the West. currently his plane was scheduled to land at Andrews Air Force Base. Rochford’s supervisor educated him to travel to the base of operations, meet a independent agency analyst named Aldrich Ames, and resolve what this deserter knew.
Rochford was a young agent, thirty years previous, with a operating data of Russian. once incoming at Andrews, he discovered that the defector’s plane had already landed which Ames had whisked him away to a independent agency asylum in Oakton. once Rochford arrived there, he found Ames, a skinny man with outsized glasses and a bushy hair United Nations agency worked on the CIA’s Soviet table. Ames was chatting with another man United Nations agency looked to be in his late forties or early fifties. He had blond hair, a bar hair, associate degreed an athletic build, although he wasn’t too tall. A scar was visible on his hand.
The man’s name was commissioned military officer Vitaly Yurchenko, of the KGB. yank intelligence officers had already started interrogation him employing a tape machine. He didn’t would like abundant prompting. in an exceedingly gush of Russian-accented English, the KGB commissioned military officer began to talk variety of astonishing Soviet secrets. the sole drawback for the Americans was deceleration him down. once 2 or 3 hours of taking note of Yurchenko, they determined to require a chance. They went right down to the basement and huddled along, heads droning.
For months, the Americans had suspected there could be a KGB mole within one in all their intelligence agencies. that will have explained many difficult events, notably the explosive arrest 2 months earlier of the CIA’s Most worthy spy within the Soviet Union, associate degree aviation specialist named Adolf Tolkachev. In those initial 2 or 3 hours within the Virginia asylum, Yurchenko disclosed the existence of not one however 2 traitors, yank intelligence officers United Nations agency were stealing United States of America secrets for the KGB. He same he didn’t grasp their names, however he gave the debriefers enough data to begin searching. One mole, he said, was a independent agency analyst—a man the KGB known as “Mr. Robert.” the opposite was associate degree worker with the National Security Agency, the organization that intercepts and reads foreign communications.
With these revelations, Yurchenko sparked a series of events round the world. Traitors were exposed, information campaigns devised and launched, secrets voiceless to the press, careers altered and destroyed. Moles, leaks, dirty tricks, “active measures”—it was an instant that exposed America’s vulnerability to Russian spying. The year 1985 came to be called the Year of the Spy. It additionally schooled a painful and unchanged set of lessons—ones that reworked the careers of intelligence professionals like archangel Rochford, whose eyes were forever opened to the penetrations of Russia and also the KGB.
But as established by Russia’s brazen and booming attack on our 2016 election, the teachings of the Year of the Spy were ones most Americans forgot.