Secret Wars by Gordon Thomas

Author:Gordon Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING YURCHENKO’S return to the lodge after his luncheon with Casey, the psychologists who were part of his debriefing team had noted how cheerful he was; he spoke positively about his future life in America, perhaps even taking up the offer of a consultancy with the CIA that Casey had mentioned. Over the ensuing weeks his excitement diminished and he became more withdrawn, spending lengthy periods in his room watching television, then going alone for a walk in the woods.

The psychologists decided Yurchenko was experiencing feelings not unusual for a defector: a growing realization of being permanently cut off from his past; an uncertainty about whether he really could make a new life in a culture so different from that which was familiar to him.

Nevertheless, Yurchenko had continued to deliver important intelligence, including information about Russia’s biological warfare system. The Soviet Union was among the 140 signatories to the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, pledging “never to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain” biological agents for offensive military purposes. Despite that, Russia had a program, Biopreparat, whose highly secret institutes continued to research and produce vast quantities of bioweapons like bubonic plague—the medieval Black Death—weapons-grade tularemia, typhus, and the deadly botulinum toxin. Biopreparat had stockpiled sufficient germs to kill every man, woman, and child on earth, along with every animal and every fish in the sea.

For hours only Yurchenko’s voice had filled the living room in the lodge, his every word recorded, as he took his listeners on a journey of biological death stored in facilities sited on Russia’s borders with Finland and Poland, deep in the Ural Mountains, and beyond to the frontiers with Iran and Afghanistan and to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. In all there were thirty-eight facilities holding untold billions of spores and pathogens.

At the end of each session, Yurchenko had gone to his bedroom to call his girlfriend, the wife of a Soviet diplomat stationed in Ottawa. At first their conversations were personal, filled with sexual overtones, and were bugged for the psychologists to analyze. They were surprised at Yurchenko’s strong sexual drive, knowing his rather prim manner. Over time, his optimism that his girlfriend would join him gave way to uncertainty. Finally she told him she would not do so, but he should return to Moscow where they could talk about their future.

Sensing his mood change, the psychologists had told the debriefers to cancel their next session with Yurchenko. The next morning, however, he had emerged for breakfast very much his old self, confident, answering each question fully, and seeming to have no worries. He had taken the debriefers through a number of assassination operations the KGB had successfully carried out. One had been on Georgy Markov, a Bulgarian dissident employed by the BBC in London. Markov had been on the way to work when a KGB agent had touched his leg with the tip of an umbrella. Within hours he was dead. The autopsy revealed Markov had been poisoned by ricin.

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