As Oleg Gordievsky was plotting his escape from Moscow, CIA operative Sharon Marie Scranage was counting the cost of passing sensitive information to her boyfriend, Michael Soussoudis, an agent for Ghanaian intelligence. Scranage was the CIA Operations Support Assistant in Accra, and had given Soussoudis details of agents and informants. The CIA noted that ‘damaging information on CIA intelligence collection activities was passed on to pro-Marxist Kojo Tsikata, Head of Ghanaian Intelligence, by Soussoudis who shared it with Cuba, Libya, East Germany and other Soviet Nations’.
According to a report in the Washington Post on 12 July 1985, Scranage had failed a polygraph test on her return to the US and agreed to cooperate with the FBI to entrap Soussoudis. In November both were found guilty of committing espionage; Scranage was also convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, set up following Philip Agee’s activities. She served two years; Soussoudis was given a twenty-year sentence suspended on condition he left the US immediately. The Ghanaian agents whose identities were compromised were stripped of their nationality and sent to America. According to female CIA operatives, in the years following, Scranage’s disgrace was regularly held up to them as an example of how easy it is to fall for a honey trap.
The 12 October 1985 People article about the various comings and goings in the spy world that were public knowledge at that point described the previous season as ‘The Spy World’s Frantic Summer’. At the time, it couldn’t have guessed at the outcome of one of the stories it covered, which turned out to be one of the oddest events of the year. Vitaly Yurchenko, described as one of the KGB’s most powerful spymasters, defected to the CIA on 1 August — and three months later defected back to the Soviet Union.
Whether he was a genuine defector who changed his mind, or a plant used to throw the CIA off the scent of the KGB’s newest recruit Aldrich Ames, has never been totally explained. Victor Cherkashin, in charge at the Washington residency throughout Yurchenko’s sojourn in the West, believed the former, and that rather than shoot Yurchenko for his crimes when he returned to the Soviet Union, the KGB elected to use his survival to confuse the CIA.
The possible reasons for Yurchenko’s change of heart after his defection were multiple. He believed that he was dying of stomach cancer, and hoped for treatment in the US; he was also in love with the wife of another Soviet official, who was now stationed in Montreal. On both counts, he received surprising news: medical investigations revealed that he only had a stomach ulcer; while the woman he loved told him that she’d loved a KGB colonel, not a traitor, and wanted nothing further to do with him. He also asked that his defection was kept quiet, to protect his wife and children back in Moscow; to his intense annoyance the CIA leaked the story to the Washington Times, eager for some good publicity.
Yurchenko had served in the KGB for a quarter of a century, and was privy to a lot more information than he passed over to the CIA. However, he did give them enough to identify both Edward Lee Howard and Ronald Pelton as Soviet spies, and passed on a warning regarding the danger facing Oleg Gordievsky (not realizing that he was already safely in Britain). Although Pelton was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment, Howard evaded his FBI surveillance and reached Moscow. He died in slightly mysterious circumstances in 2002.
The last straw for Yurchenko was the release of information he had passed over regarding Nicholas Shadrin, aka Nikolai Artmanov, a former Soviet Baltic Fleet captain who had defected to the West in 1959, and eventually ended up as a triple agent. Realizing his treachery, the KGB had kidnapped Shadrin in Vienna in December 1975, but unfortunately he died during transportation behind the Iron Curtain. His widow filed a suit against the US government, and Yurchenko’s revelations about Shadrin’s real fate — his work for the CIA had been public knowledge since 1978 — were included in the Agency’s papers handed over as part of the court case, which were then released to the media.
On 2 November, Yurchenko persuaded his CIA handler to take him shopping, during which time he called the KGB residency at the embassy. He then went for a meal and asked his handler if the agent would shoot him were he to get up and walk out. ‘We don’t treat defectors that way,’ the CIA man replied. Yurchenko left the table and went straight to the Soviet embassy.
Although the KGB knew exactly what Yurchenko told the CIA during his debriefing, since Aldrich Ames was one of those involved in his interrogation, they allowed him to claim that he had been kidnapped and drugged, and not been a willing party to anything. Public denunciations of the CIA followed; the Agency retaliated by claiming that Yurchenko had been executed, and his family charged for the bullets. Yurchenko promptly appeared in an interview from Moscow with German television to point out he was ‘live and kicking’. All that was certain was that, in the words of a Life magazine article from the following September, the questions raised by his defection and return ‘threatened to again pry open a Pandora’s box of suspicions and troubles’ within the CIA.
Defections went both ways during the summer of 1985. Three weeks after Yurchenko crossed from East to West, Hans Joachim Tiedge, a top West German counter-intelligence officer went the other way. The alcoholic officer — whose deputy at the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (West German counter-intelligence) was also a spy for East Germany — defected ‘because of a hopeless personal situation, but of my own free will’, according to the handwritten note he released shortly afterwards. Tiedge had been searching for East German and Soviet moles in West Germany, but instead had been in a position to tip them off that they were under investigation. At least three agents fled to the East in the weeks before Tiedge’s defection, and one of Chancellor Kohl’s secretaries, Herta-Astrid Willner, would follow a few weeks later, believing that she would no longer be protected. On 23 August, four days after Tiedge took a train to the East, East German authorities claimed that they had arrested 170 West German spies in East Germany as a result of information supplied by Tiedge.
According to Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf (who claimed in 1997, rather disingenuously, that Tiedge hadn’t worked for the GDR prior to his defection), Tiedge had a computer-like memory, despite his alcoholism, and was able to pass on copious details on plans, personnel and operations. According to one official estimate, between his time in the West, and the information he gave during his debriefing, he compromised 816 different operations. Unsurprisingly, an atmosphere of mistrust grew between the West Germans and the other Western intelligence agencies as a result, even after Heribert Hellenbroich, Tiedge’s boss, was fired shortly after the defection for keeping Tiedge on the job despite his evident problems.
Tiedge fled from East Germany to Moscow in 1990, shortly before German reunification, and despite the statute of limitations for his crimes expiring, did not return to the former West Germany before his death in April 2011.
As well as the embarrassment caused by the re-defection of Vitaly Yurchenko, November 1985 saw the revelation of the activities of naval intelligence officer Jonathan Jay Pollard, who was arrested outside the Israeli embassy after his spymasters there refused to help him. Sentenced to life imprisonment, his case became a cause célèbre in Israel, leading to tension between Washington and Tel Aviv. However, the case is not as clear-cut as many would like it to be.
Pollard’s superiors in the intelligence community, four retired Navy admirals, pointed out in an article in the Washington Post in December 1998 that: