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Vitaly Yurchenko
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vitaly Yurchenko (1936 – ?) was a KGB agent in the Soviet Union. In 1985, after twenty-five years of service in the KGB, he defected to the United States during an assignment in Rome. In the following interrogations by the CIA, he accused two American agents of working for the KGB, Ronald Pelton and Edward Lee Howard. While Pelton was later convicted, Howard fled the US before he could be questioned.
In November of that year, Yurchenko himself re-defected back to the USSR by crawling out of a bathroom window at Au Pied de Cochon, a restaurant in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. (today a Five Guys hamburger restaurant), and walking to the Soviet Embassy, bringing about suspicions about his defection story and information. It is possible that he was acting as a double agent, seeking to fool the CIA with wrong leads to protect one of the USSR's then most important CIA traitors, Aldrich Ames.