Defector ‘was useful’
NZPA-Reuter Washington Vitaly Yurchenko, the KGB official who defeoted to the West earlier this year, only to return later to Moscow, was a true defector, said the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr William Webster, yesterday. “We have opened a substantial number of (spy) cases based on very useful information that he (Yurchenko) has supplied,” Mr Webster said.
“Certainly everything that I know about it is that it would be an act of folly to have given up that kind of information simply to have some embarrassment for the United States going on at the time of the SovietAmerican summit,” he said. “It’s been very useful.” Yurchenko’s decision to return to the Soviet Union touched off a debate over whether he truly defected and later changed his mind or had only pretended to defect in order to embarrass the West. FBI officials said last week that information given to them by Yurchenko had led them to the arrest of Ronald Pelton, an employee at the super-secret National Security Agency who has since been charged with selling secrets to Moscow for cash.
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Press, 3 December 1985, Page 10
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186Defector ‘was useful’ Press, 3 December 1985, Page 10
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