Spy affair inquiry ordered

Press, 13 November 1985, Page 8

Spy affair inquiry ordered

NZPA-AFP Los Angeles The President of the United States, Mr Ronald Reagan, is planning to order an inquiry into possible C.I.A. blunders over the Soviet double “defector,” Vitaly Yurchenko, the “Los Angeles Times” reports, quoting Government officials.

Central Intelligence Agency officers had taken' the Soviet K.G.B. agent to a meeting with the woman he loved, had failed to realise he was depressed afterwards, and had left him alone long enough to arrange his “redefection” to the Soviet Union, the officials said. Mr Yurchenko had decided to leave the United States after the meeting last

month in Canada with Valentina Yereskovsky, wife of the Soviet Consul in Montreal, whom he had loved for seven years, the newspaper said. But in a contradictory report, the “Toronto Star” quoted Canadian secret service officers who said that the woman was not his lover but another K.G.B. agent. ■ In a statement issued yesterday in Montreal, Mr Alexander Yereskovsky said that the love affair tag was a “foul lie” to “drag Canada into an anti-Soviet campaign to tarnish relations between Ottawa and Moscow.” Nevertheless the “Los Angeles Times,” quoting United States Government

officials, said that after the meeting with Mrs Yereskovsky, Mr Yurchenko was “despondent and depressed” because she had refused to join him. Even though he had appeared to genuinely detest the Soviet system, the main motive for his defection “seemed to have been his desire to live with this woman and start a new life with her,” said one Government official quoted by the

paper. The Yurchenko case was sometimes left in the hands of junior officers and guards who spoke no Russian, the sources said in the “Los Angeles Times.”

Another American official said that Mr Yurchenko had been left alone several

times in the weeks before his redefection, including a day when he asked permission to go and join a bowling dub. “What he was doing,” saidthe official, “was getting in touch with the Soviets to negotiate for his return.” Another day Mr Yurchenko slipped away from a C.I.A. agent who “didn’t even get up” when he left the restaurant table where they were dining about a mile from the Soviet Embassy, the same source said. Mr Yurchenko, who left the United States for the Soviet Union last week, said that he was abducted by C.I.A. agents in Rome in August and subsequently “interrogated and tortured” in a safe-house in Virginia.