Arkady Shevchenko
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Arkady Shevchenko was a Soviet diplomat who served as Undersecretary General of the United Nations and as an aide to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, before secretly spying for the CIA and ultimately defecting to the United States in 1978. John Kiriakou calls him the single most important spy the CIA ever had inside the Soviet power structure.

Disillusionment and recruitment

Per Kiriakou, Shevchenko became disillusioned in the early 1970s with the gap between the Soviet Union's public posture on détente with the United States and its private cheating on disarmament agreements, as well as with communist economic planning generally. He reached out to the CIA to defect in 1975, but was persuaded to remain in place as an agent rather than defect immediately, a posting from which, in Kiriakou's telling, he became the single most important Soviet-side asset the agency ever ran.

Defection

On March 31, 1978, under suspected KGB surveillance, Shevchenko received a cable from Moscow ordering his return. Believing the recall was effectively a death sentence, he triggered an emergency meeting with his CIA handler and defected on the spot. He had never told his wife, Leonia, that he had been working with the CIA or that he intended to defect, and left her only a note after calling his handler.

Rather than join him, his wife called the KGB and returned to Moscow. Shevchenko was tried in absentia in the Soviet Union and sentenced to death. He settled in Bethesda, Maryland, remarried, and wrote the international bestselling memoir Breaking with Moscow; he died there of a heart attack.

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- John Kiriakou
- KGB
