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BAYARD & HOLMES

~ Jay Holmes

Since our first Bayard & Holmes Love-A-Spook Day, we annually have honored either an individual or a group of people from the Intelligence Community (“IC”). This year, we add Soviet defector Arkady Nikolayevich Shevchenko to our pantheon of awardees, alongside the likes of Ric Prado, Virginia Hall, Billy Waugh, Josephine Baker, and others. Arkady Shevchenko, a United Nations undersecretary general from the Soviet Union, was the highest-ranked Soviet Union official to defect during the Cold War. With his information, Shevchenko brought awakening and determination to a war-weary country, confirming the nefarious intentions of the Soviet Union.

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Early Years

Arkady Shevchenko was born on October 11, 1930, in Horvlika, Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union (“USSR”) at that time. His family moved to Crimea when he was five, where his father, a doctor, worked at a tuberculosis sanatorium. When Germany invaded Crimea in 1941, Arkady’s family was evacuated to Torgai in Siberia. In 1944, the German military retreated from Crimea, and Arkady and his family returned. One year later, his father attended the Allied Yalta Conference for the purpose of evaluating the health of US President Franklin Roosevelt for the Soviet government.

The reason for the Yalta Conference, from the point of view of the US and the UK, was for the Western Allies to agree on the free status of liberated nations that had been occupied by the Nazis or governments such as Romania and Hungary. Stalin and the USSR held a drastically different view for the future of European nations liberated from Nazi rule than did the Allies.

The Soviet Union claimed to have lost twenty million citizens during World War II. Historians debate numbers from eighteen million to twenty-seven million total casualties. Whatever the precise number, it was a huge number of losses, and those losses can contribute to an understanding of Soviet thinking in 1945. The fact that Arkady’s father was selected to attend the Yalta Conference, even in a peripheral role, indicates that the Schevchenko family was well-trusted by the Soviet hierarchy. Arkady likely lived at a higher standard than the average Soviet citizen.

In 1949, Shevchenko graduated from high school and was selected to attend the academically elite Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Average applicants who were children of respected Communist Party members could gain admission to a military or KGB Academy. However, admission to the Institute of International Relations required high academic ability in addition to the right Party pedigree. Shevchenko made the grade.

While at the Institute, Arkady studied law and Marxist, Leninist, and Stalinist political theory. Because of his high performance in school and debate groups, Arkady was quickly eyed for selection to fast track in the Soviet Foreign Service. Arkady married his fellow high-performing student, Leongina, in 1951, and completed his initial studies in 1954. He then did a program of  graduate studies in Foreign Service. During his time at the Institute, he socialized with many future leaders of the USSR.

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The Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs

In 1956, Shevchenko joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was assigned to the  Department of International Organizations which oversaw relations with the UN and with NGOs around the world. Arkady was given a prestigious first posting as an attaché to the  UN General Assembly, acting as a specialist in nuclear disarmament. 

In 1962, Shevchenko attended the Geneva Committee on Disarmament. The next year, he was promoted to the position of Chief of the Soviet Mission’s Security Council and Political Affairs Division at the United Nations. This was considered a long term position so Arkady’s family was allowed to accompany him to New York City. He continued in that post until 1970, when he was appointed advisor to Andrei Gromyko.

In his disarmament role, Shevchenko dealt with top level Soviet leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This particular experience left a long-lasting impression on Arkady. He felt that during this dangerous political crisis, the Soviet military leadership had been far too cavalier about the implications of nuclear war. Had Arkady known how wildly the Soviet military was overestimating their nuclear weapons capabilities, he likely would have been horrified.

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Disillusionment

This particular political crisis that left Shevchenko with a growing personal crisis of conscience. In 1969, for reasons not known to rational thinkers throughout the world, Mao Tse Tung of the People’s Republic of China decided it was a good time to escalate a century-old border dispute by attacking the Soviet Union at various points along their shared border. I was a teenager, and from my distant position, I found the dispute entertaining. Had I understood all the implications, I might have enjoyed it less. Again, Shevchenko saw the Soviet military as being too willing to quickly use nuclear weapons against China.

Those two crises are themselves beyond the scope of this article, but suffice to say they impacted Shevchenko profoundly.

In 1973, Shevchenko was again promoted and became an Undersecretary General to the United Nations. In accepting the position, Shevchenko was publicly agreeing that his first allegiance would be to the United Nations and the goal of world peace. The USSR leadership felt that while Shevchenko was welcome to pay lip service to the UN, his real first allegiance was to the USSR and the promotion of the Soviet Union’s goals and policies. Arkady felt that the narrow-minded views of the leaders in Moscow caused them to miss opportunities for improving foreign relations for the Soviet Union and made a mockery of his position at the UN.

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Defection

Arkady lived as good a life as nearly anyone could in the USSR, and his future was well assured. What he lacked was any hope that life for the Soviet people would improve. Shevchenko contacted the CIA to seek political asylum in the United States. I believe it was around 1975; however, the exact date is not available.

The CIA could see that Arkady Shevchenko would be an invaluable intelligence asset for the US. Ironically, according to the Washington Post, American traitor Aldrich Ames, who later spied on behalf of the Soviet Union, was one of the CIA officers who debriefed Shevchenko upon his defection.

Shevchenko was in a unique position to inform the US government not just of the week-to-week thinking of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, but of the basic brutal long term intentions of the Soviet establishment. The Agency managed to convince him to remain in place in his current position and help keep the US informed about Soviet intentions.

Understandably, Arkady was concerned about the possibility of being too easily discovered by the KGB. He knew the price could be anything from a bullet to the head to a live cremation, feet first, one inch at a time. That was a Soviet Union favorite for disposing of traitors. Nevertheless, Shevchenko agreed to stay in place and take the risk. He reported all that he knew to the CIA.

I admire his courage. He had to know that the United States was in no position to deny him asylum if he simply went public with his request. He could have played that card very easily. He didn’t. His courage and idealism should not be forgotten.

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The Western Awakening

It was the mid-1970s. At that point in history, the West was engulfed in the post-Vietnam political reality. The CIA and the entire national defense community lived with a sense that we were battling public relations and domestic political battles as much as we were defending against foreign threats. Many people in the West felt the fight against the Soviet Union was no longer justified. For those in the trenches, it was not a pleasant feeling.

Shevchenko’s information was pivotal in waking up many discouraged and demoralized people in the Western defense communities, as well as a few sleeping politicians. Even if they would not listen to the Pentagon and the CIA, they could listen to a high-level source in the Soviet government. Shevchenko gave evidence to support the fact that the Soviet Union was not an empty threat, and that the Soviet leadership really was as malignant as the Cold War warriors said it was.

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What Shevchenko Did

Because the USSR transmitted information concerning its UN mission with both the KGB and Foreign Ministry ciphers, our NSA benefited substantially in its code-breaking work from the years of multi-channel information that Shevchenko provided. At the same time, those decrypted messages served to verify Shevchenko’s legitimacy as a valuable asset.

Much of the information on Arkady Shevchenko’s service to the United States is still unavailable to the public. However, what is publicly known is that Arkady remained in place as the UN undersecretary general in New York for three years, still working for the Soviet Union while feeding information to the US. Early in 1978, he realized he was under increased KGB surveillance. Then, on March 31, 1978, Shevchenko received a message instructing him to return to Moscow for a meeting with the Soviet Foreign Ministry. He knew it was time to bail.

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Coming In From the Cold

The CIA activated a plan to safely “bring in” Shevchenko and move him to secure asylum. Because an arrest of Shevchenko would reflect negatively on very high members of the Soviet government, the KGB (we assume) wanted to present a solid case for Shevchenko’s arrest. This, along with freshly decrypted codes, gave Arkady a little time to make his move.

On April 10, 1978, Arkady left a note to his wife, Leongina, explaining his intentions, along with instructions allowing her an opportunity to follow him to safety. He had guessed that she would not seek asylum with him. He was right. As soon as she read the note, she called the KGB. Arkady was already under protection by then and being moved to a safe location. His wife was taken back to the USSR, where she died of  “suicide” a few months later. My guess is that she knew too much and could not be left alive.

Arkady Schevchenko was the highest-ranking Soviet official to defect to the West. The Soviet Union tried him in absentia and sentenced him to death.

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The Next Twenty Years

For the next twenty years, Shevchenko lived in the United States, publishing articles and giving lectures. In 1979, a sex worker published a story in which she claimed she was hired by the FBI to be Arkady’s mistress. Maybe. One way or another, I don’t care. I won’t mention her name here. That same year, he married a court stenographer and real estate agent, Elaine Jackson.

In 1985, Arkady published “Breaking With Moscow,” his autobiography. In it, he describes Soviet Russia as, among other things, a gangster economy in which the KGB played a prominent role. He also confirms in the book for the first time publicly that he spied for the CIA.

Arkady Schevchenko lived to see the end of the Soviet Union. He died of a heart attack in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on February 28, 1998, and was buried at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC, with only a wooden cross with a plaque to mark his grave. He was survived by two children from his first marriage, daughter Anya Shevchenko and son Gennady Shevchenko, and Gennady’s family, who had remained in the Soviet Union after Arkady’s defection.

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We and all who love freedom owe a debt of honor to the courageous and dedicated

Arkady Shevchenko.

 

 

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“From novices to experts, I suspect everyone will find something in this book that they did not know before.”

~ Doug Patteson, Film Technical Advisor and Former CIA Operations Officer