Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 13, 1990 TAG: 9003133283
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Sergei Chetverikov, charge d'affaires of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, confirmed that the defector, Victor Ivanovich Sheymov, was a former KGB employee who disappeared in 1980. But he said that the man was a low-level technician who would have no access to the kind of secrets he recounted to a crowded news conference earlier this month.
Chetverikov said that a formal protest he handed to Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger accused the CIA of trying to rekindle the Cold War by ordering Sheymov to accuse Soviet intelligence of trying to assassinate Pope John Paul II. The Soviet official, Moscow's highest ranking diplomat in Washington during the temporary absence of the ambassador, denied any Soviet participation in the attempt on the pope's life.
"There are very influential quarters in this capital that don't like the improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations," Chetverikov said.
Sheymov, his appearance altered by a bushy wig, said that he left Moscow with CIA help on May 16, 1980, becoming a real-life example of that staple of spy fiction - the defecting intelligence officer. At the time, the KGB and the CIA were involved in sometimes deadly clandestine warfare in which defections played an important role.
Chetverikov said that he was shocked by Sheymov's illegal departure from the Soviet Union.
"What is involved here is an unprecedented . . . subversive action by the U.S. intelligence involving a smuggling out (of Moscow) of a Soviet family, and a gross violation of rules of international law, which is, in fact, an act of state terrorism," the diplomat said. He read from a prepared statement which he said had been cleared at the highest levels of the Soviet government.
At his news conference, Sheymov said he read a KGB internal memo in 1979 launching a plot to kill the pope. He said he told the CIA about the message in 1980, months before Mehmet Ali Agca attempted to kill the pontiff in May 1981. Sheymov also said that the KGB had two "sources" in the State Department in the 1970s. That and other stories he offered were plausible, but none was capable of being independently verified.
by CNB