Double Trouble

In trying to fool the KGB, the U.S. may have fooled itself

One mystery that still haunts U.S. intelligence officials is the disappearance of Double Agent Nicholas Shadrin while on assignment in Vienna more than two years ago. Did he fall into a KGB trap? Or was he betrayed by U.S. intelligence officials?

Born Nikolai Fedorovich Artamonov, he was a 30-year-old captain in the Soviet navy when he defected to the U.S. in 1959 with his Polish fiancee Ewa. For nine months American agents questioned him about Soviet naval secrets at safe houses in Virginia. Then Artamonov changed his name to Nicholas Shadrin and went to work for the Pentagon as an intelligence analyst. He married Ewa, became a U.S. citizen and settled into the good bourgeois life in McLean, Va. He made no attempt to hide his background as a defector; he testified about it before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1960.

In 1966 Shadrin was approached by KGB operatives. At the request of American officials, he signed up as a Soviet agent and began feeding his KGB spymasters FBI-supplied information about U.S. intelligence methods, much of it harmless but true to gain the KGB's confidence, and some of it false and misleading.

On Dec. 20, 1975, while ostensibly on a skiing vacation in Europe with his wife, Shadrin had a prearranged meeting with two KGB officers on the steps of a church in Vienna, then vanished. At Ewa's insistence, the U.S. repeatedly asked the Soviets for information about Shadrin's fate. Gerald Ford sent an inquiry to Leonid Brezhnev, who replied vaguely that the KGB had not kidnaped Shadrin. U.S. officials told reporters that Shadrin was probably dead or in a Soviet prison. In response to suggestions of U.S. bungling, some officials even suggested that Shadrin had been a Soviet plant, a triple agent, and his disappearance was a clumsy Russian way of bringing him in from the cold.

Now more facts are emerging about the Shadrin case, and they make it seem every bit as complicated and cold-blooded as a John Le Carre plot. TIME has learned that in 1966 a KGB agent known as Igor was posted as a diplomat to the Soviet embassy in Washington. In an extraordinarily straightforward way, he phoned the home of CIA Director Richard Helms and talked to his then-wife Julia. Igor offered to become a double agent, or, in Le Carre's famous term, a "mole," who would burrow deeply into the Soviet espionage network and pass on secrets to the U.S. Julia turned Igor over to her husband, who in turn passed him on to U.S. counterintelligence operatives.

Igor told the Americans that he could possibly get a higher post within the KGB. He said he would have a better chance of this if he could recruit Shadrin as a Soviet agent. U.S. intelligence officials, though suspicious, decided to help. Thus, even before the KGB got in touch with Shadrin, he had been persuaded by U.S. officials to become a double agent, despite considerable misgivings on his part.

Just why U.S. intelligence officials allowed him to walk into an apparent KGB trap in Vienna nine years later is still a mystery. Ewa, who is now a dentist in McLean, believes, despite official denials, that he was set up and "sacrificed" as part of a larger intelligence operation, presumably involving the mysterious Igor. U.S. officials decline comment, but there is a lingering suspicion in intelligence circles that in going along with Igor's request to help the KGB recruit Shadrin, the U.S. fell for a Soviet plot. Igor could very well have been a triple agent, as some U.S. officials have suspected all along. One American intelligence official speculated wryly that the name Igor could be a play on the Russian word for game. -

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