Soviet KGB agents defected to the United States three months later, and returned to the Soviet Union, and the CIA later discovered that the defection was a conspiracy to hide bigger fish!
On August 1, 1985, on the streets of Rome, Italy, the sun was shining and the birds were singing. A delegation of well-dressed Soviet scientists was strolling the streets with great interest while admiring the beauty of Rome and the enthusiastic Italian beauties passing by from time to time.
Just as everyone was preparing to return, a middle-aged man in the team said that he was still unfulfilled and was ready to visit the long-desired Vatican Museums to fulfill his long-cherished wish for many years.
The man's task in the team was to protect and monitor the scientists, and the leader who knew his identity did not think much and led everyone back to the Soviet embassy.
After watching the crowd disappear from afar, the man immediately called the US embassy on a street pay phone, and the man nervously informed him of his identity: the head of the First Main Directorate of the KGB and the head of intelligence work in the United States and Canada, and said that he wanted to defect to the United States.
The American who received the call was overjoyed, because he was the highest-ranking KGB officer to have defected to the West so far, and he must have carried a lot of important intelligence on him. After the report, the General Administration was also ecstatic and quickly took him to the US embassy and immediately arranged for his transfer to the United States.
The middle-aged man, Yurcchenko, was born in 1935. By 1985, he was a veteran agent with 30 years of experience. Due to his outstanding work ability, he has always been a capable general within the KGB, solved many difficult problems, and was used by his boss Andropov, and was not long ago promoted to the head of the first division of the first main directorate of the KGB, with the rank of colonel. Not surprisingly, at the age of 50, he will definitely wear the star of general in the future.
The CIA was overjoyed by the defection of such a heavyweight, which quickly placed him in a secret residence in New York and sent a senior agent to question him.
However, at this moment, the US intelligence network in various parts of the Soviet Union has just been continuously destroyed, and it realizes that there is a big problem inside, so the most hope is to dig up the "mole" inside the CIA through Yurtchenko.
Yulchenko also cooperated in the confession of two agents. But what the CIA didn't know was that the agent in charge of questioning Yulchenko was Ames, who turned out to be a KGB spy. It is conceivable that during more than a month of questioning, the information provided by Yulchenko was all known to the Soviets without exception, and in the end did not cause major losses to the Soviet spy network.
However, on November 2, three months after Yulchenko's defection, Yulchenko, who was on the street, suddenly got rid of the CIA agents who "protected" him with his rich experience and stepped into the Soviet embassy, stunned the agents who were already at ease with him in the distance.
Then the Soviet Embassy held a press conference in New York, announcing that Yulchenko had been kidnapped and forcibly taken away by the Americans, and that his confessions had been forced to be uttered by the Americans using a special drug that made him unconscious. In addition, Yulchenko angrily denounced the Americans at the meeting, which made the CIA lose face.
But what is unmistakable is that the information he provided is true, which makes the cunning CIA scratch its head. In the end, they could only guess that it may be that Yulchenko had been monitored too closely and restricted, and at the same time, the attitude when questioning made Yulchenko disgusted, and finally defected again. To this end, the CIA has also tinkered with its own rules for treating defectors.
However, the CIA also knew that the KGB "severely punished" such agents who had defected, so it was also thinking about watching Yulchenko's jokes. However, something that made them even more confused happened. After returning home, Yulchenko was not punished, received a Order of the Red Star, and after passing the loyalty test, returned to the KGB to continue working until his retirement in 1993.
This dumbfounded the Americans!!!
After some careful scrutiny, the CIA gradually discovered that something was wrong. Yulchenko's defection was most likely a KGB conspiracy.
First of all, the two KGB agents he confessed were no longer front-line personnel and were not of high value.
Secondly, after that, 3 more intelligence officers were arrested in the Soviet Union, and these 3 people could not have been known by the two people Yurcchenko confessed. Therefore, there must be a bigger "mole" within the CIA.
However, after further internal investigation by the CIA, it still did not find any clues, so it had to be stopped. It wasn't until two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1993 that a near-retirement agent re-entered their sights. The reason is that the agent suddenly bought a luxury car, and the income and expenses obviously did not match.
After careful investigation, it turned out that the "big mole" that had never been dug up was Ames, an old agent who had worked for the CIA for 31 years, and he was the person in charge of questioning Yulchenko.
They had not been suspicious of Ames, but the Yurcchenko incident made them turn their attention elsewhere. According to the investigation, Ames was bought by the KGB early on, which led to the exposure of 25 CIA spies, and he received a total of $4.5 million from the Soviets.
With Ames' arrest, many people began to think, including former CIA director Robert Gates, that Yulchenko's defection was actually a trap for the Soviets from the beginning. By confessing to spies who have lost their value, the CIA is allowed to let its guard down to cover the real big fish behind it.
This spy in a spy, a plan in a plan, is indeed dazzling, but what is the real inside of this matter, because the file has not been declassified, with the death of the 86-year-old Yurtchenko in 2021, no one can know! However, among the four major spy defections of the Cold War, this may be the most bizarre, confusing, and even the most incredible defection.
