Arkady Shevchenko; 1970s Soviet Defector

Arkady Shevchenko, the highest-ranking Soviet diplomat to seek asylum in the United States, has died. He was 67.

Considered the CIA’s catch of the 1970s, Shevchenko defected in April 1978. When he announced through his attorney that he would not go home, Soviet officials said he was being held in the United States under duress.

“It’s really a shame that someone who contributed so much to this country and to the West in general had such an unfortunate and lonely end here,” said Bill Geimer of the Jamestown Foundation, which promoted high-level defections from the Soviet Union and provided career counseling and other help to defectors.

Shevchenko died Feb. 28 in his home in Bethesda, Md., of an apparent heart attack. He was buried Saturday. He was working on a book about the Soviet Union’s foreign policy establishment at the time of his death.

Shevchenko was undersecretary-general of the United Nations in the mid-1970s, when he began providing secrets to the Central Intelligence Agency. Before taking his U.N. post, he was secretary in Moscow to Andrei Gromyko, then Soviet foreign minister.

After his defection, Shevchenko wrote the best-selling book “Breaking With Moscow” and commanded lucrative lecture fees. In his book, Shevchenko said the road to success was not easy and that his CIA handlers proved insensitive to the trauma of defection. The KGB whisked his wife back to Moscow, where she reportedly committed suicide.

In the fall of 1978, Shevchenko was involved in a bizarre security scandal when a Washington call girl named Judy Chavez charged publicly that she was being paid by the CIA to provide sex for him. The ensuing publicity, Geimer said, devastated Shevchenko. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Shevchenko disappeared from public view.