The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

question of Yurchenko ultimately having to testify in court was far from resolved. What was certain was that within a matter of days the press would explode with the whole sordid story, the kidnapping in Vienna, the chloroforming and hefty injection of sedatives for the drive to the Czech border. Then the panic when the KGB got Artamonov on “friendly” Czech soil and discovered he had stopped breathing. The futile attempts at CPR, the brandy poured down his throat by a panicky KGB officer, the injection of adrenaline by another. Then the understanding that Nikolai F. Artamonov was dead. Finally, the details of a cover-up that included enlisting the General Secretary of the USSR to lie to two U.S. Presidents. All of that would start appearing in the newspapers in a matter of days, and the man in the hot seat, Vitaly Yurchenko, seemed calm and appeared to be taking it all in stride.

“Will you tell me when they tell his wife?”

“I’ll call you myself.”

Yurchenko’s face lit up again. “Look, Tom. The beaver!”

Driving back to Washington that evening, I thought I should be feeling pretty good about Yurchenko taking the news about going public with the Artamonov case so well. But somehow I didn’t.

In 1959, at thirty-one, Nikolai Artamonov was the youngest torpedo-destroyer commander in the Soviet Baltic Fleet. While his ship was on station near the Polish port of Gdansk, he met a beautiful Polish dental student named Blanka Ewa Gora. Nikolai and Ewa decided to escape together and ultimately set their sights on defecting to the United States. Artamonov decided to commandeer a motor launch from his destroyer, and then he and Ewa took off for Sweden across the Baltic. They made it to Sweden and never looked back. Artamonov had left a wife and son in Leningrad.

After his defection, Artamonov was debriefed by the CIA and given a new identity as Nicholas George Shadrin and a job serving the Defense Intelligence Agency as an analyst of Soviet naval developments. While Artamonov had been convicted of treason and sentenced to death back home in the Soviet Union, Shadrin soon blended into suburban life in the United States.

That all changed in 1966, when the KGB counterintelligence group responsible for tracking the Soviet Union’s traitors spotted Shadrin on the lecture circuit in Washington, where his reputation as an analyst of Soviet military power was growing. The KGB decided to mount an intricate operation to turn Shadrin back against the CIA and ultimately bring him back to the USSR to denounce the agency and the decadent West. KGB Colonel Igor Kochnov was assigned the task of approaching Shadrin and carried two personal letters from Shadrin’s ex-wife and his son to win him over. Kochnov approached Shadrin in a Virginia supermarket, and Shadrin feigned interest but then promptly reported the contact to the CIA. The agency told him to convince the Soviets that he was willing to spy for them. Shadrin would now be a triple agent.

The case only became more confused when Igor Kochnov, the KGB colonel who had approached Shadrin, volunteered to spy for the CIA.

The case became so complex that the FBI, CIA, and DIA all became involved, and there were competing theories within the U.S. intelligence community about Shadrin’s true loyalties, even though he and his new wife eventually became naturalized U.S. citizens.

By the mid-1970s, the KGB had lost interest in running Shadrin as a double agent. Instead, they wanted to kidnap him and spirit him back to the USSR as a prisoner of the espionage wars. For their snatch operation, the KGB decided on the European city where they felt most at home, Vienna. Shadrin would be kidnapped in Vienna, drugged, and driven across the border into Czechoslovakia.

On December 18, 1975, Shadrin was sent to meet the KGB in Vienna. Shadrin agreed to a second meeting with the KGB two days later, on December 20. Then, he simply vanished.

The U.S. government initially asked Ewa Shadrin to cover for her husband’s absence and to remain quiet while efforts were made to secure his release. She was told at one point that Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, would raise the issue with the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin.

At first, Ewa cooperated with the government’s requests. But eventually it became clear to her that her husband had been sent to Vienna without adequate protection, and her attempts to get answers to her questions were met with cold silence.

In 1976, a few months after Shadrin’s disappearance, his case began to get presidential attention, when President Gerald Ford asked Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev about Shadrin’s whereabouts. Brezhnev responded that Shadrin had indeed met with representatives of the Committee for State Security in Vienna on December 18, 1975, to discuss his repatriation to the Soviet Union, but he said he had failed to show for a second scheduled meeting. Brezhnev said he had no further information about Shadrin but could assure the American President that he was not in the Soviet Union. President Carter raised the Shadrin case again with Brezhnev but got the same answer.

Shadrin’s fate had remained a mystery until Yurchenko had arrived with the answer. He told the CIA that Shadrin had died in a botched kidnapping by the KGB. Thrown into the trunk of a car for the drive across the Austrian border, Shadrin had been drugged to keep him quiet. But the KGB had mistakenly given him an overdose, and when the KGB men stopped their car and opened the trunk to check on their prisoner, they found that he was dead.

When Yurchenko told the CIA about Shadrin’s death, he warned his debriefers that this was one of the darkest secrets of the KGB. Brezhnev had lied to two American Presidents about Shadrin, so the credibility of the head of state was on the line. Yurchenko made it clear to the CIA that if Moscow ever found out that he had revealed the truth about Shadrin, the KGB would go after Yurchenko’s family and property. Yurchenko, like