SHEVCHENKO, ARKADI

Code-named DYNAMITE by the Central Intelligence Agency, which ran him for a year or so before he defected in April 1978, Shevchenko was a career Soviet apparatchik recruited in New York, where he was employed as an assistant general secretary in the  United Nations Secretariat. After being granted political asylum in the United States, he was resettled in Alexandria, Virginia. Soon after his defection, his wife died in Moscow, apparently of an overdose. Although never a KGB officer, Shevchenko was able to identify most of the local rezidentura. Shevchenko’s initial resettlement in the United States was marred by his indulgence in alcohol and prostitutes but, despite the embarrassment of being written about in  Defector’s Mistress by Judith Chavez, he married a Washington, D.C., lawyer.