"I still remember, I remember this town," Boris Yuzhin murmured, looking for landmarks as he piloted his Dodge van up the steep curves of the Diamond Heights section here. Recognizing a small shopping center, he veered off, parked the van outside a pizzeria and circled on foot through Christopher Park to a secluded pathway among cedars and pines. There, on his knees, he pried at the planks of a wooden staircase, searching for holes.
In the late 1970s and early '80s, Yuzhin and other officers of the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, scouted this "drop" and others like it in the Bay area as places to hide microfilm for pickup by other Soviet spies. Then, as a double agent, he disclosed those locations, and much other information, to the FBI.He was betrayed in turn by a mole inside the Central Intelligence Agency, in all likelihood the admitted Soviet spy Aldrich H. Ames. (Yuzhin says that as a result of Ames' debriefings by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he has learned that Ames was in fact the one who betrayed him, a finding that the FBI will not publicly confirm.)
Arrested in Moscow in late 1986 and somehow escaping the usual death sentence for treason, he suffered a harsh gulag imprisonment of five years before winning amnesty, along with the last group of Soviet political prisoners, from the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. Now, having come full circle nearly two decades after his first mission against America, the hale and silver-haired Yuzhin, at 52, is back here cruising his old haunts and struggling to carve out a new career as a writer and archivist - the very covers the KGB once assigned him.
His is a tangled tale, among a swelling number of such accounts by longtime soldiers in the espionage skirmishes of the Cold War who have come forward with descriptions of hidden intrigue while hoping to cash in on marketable memoirs.
Yuzhin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who now lives in the Marin County town of Novato with his wife, 20-year-old daughter and prize Afghan hound, acknowledges that he would not spurn a good offer for his own story, although he says his main interest is in setting the record straight. He says, for example, that he does not believe he betrayed his country in working to overturn a system that he came to view as brutal and corrupt. Even in prison, he says, he never had a moment's regret.
Among all the yarns spun by former spies, Yuzhin's account, which is confirmed by his former handlers and contacts at the FBI, stands out in several ways.
For one thing, he is one of the rare double agents uncovered by the Soviet Union who nonetheless survived; perhaps 10 American operatives were executed by the Soviets as a result of the Ames case alone, according to American intelligence officials.
Moreover, the FBI confirms, Yuzhin was an extremely valuable catch, turning over top-secret Soviet cable traffic, providing an almost daily window into KGB operations in northern California and helping to tip the authorities to at least one major Soviet spy. Through him, on occasion, the FBI was even able to select the KGB's own drop sites.
"We looked at him as a superstar," said James Fox, retired head of the bureau's New York office, who "ran" Yuzhin in San Francisco in the late 1970s and recalls that task as the highlight of a 31-year career that included the arrest of the World Trade Center bombers.
Yuzhin first came to the United States in July 1975, as a KGB captain. He had a postgraduate degree in history and he was planted among a group of visiting Soviet academicians and given the job of cultivating opinionmakers and rising stars at the research institutes around the University of California at Berkeley.
Instead, Yuzhin says, America bowled him over. Although indoctrinated to despise a decadent Western enemy, "within a week here I felt I could breathe openly."
In playing the role of visiting scholar, he was quizzed repeatedly by Berkeley students on the cases of imprisoned Soviet dissidents. He had to admit that he had never heard of them.
So he spent his days at the university library, reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other authors banned back home. He soon realized, he said the other day, that "I've been deceived all my life - not only I, the whole system has been deceiving itself."
Suspecting his KGB role but unaware of his growing receptivity to American life, the FBI had meanwhile embarked on a scheme to entice him with a young woman in supposed legal trouble and FBI agents masquerading as legal advisers.
Yuzhin says they need not have gone to all the trouble. "It was not a good performance," he said. For one thing, one agent let slip another's real name. For another, Yuzhin says, no real lawyers would have been so generous with their time. Still, "we each pretended we believed each other."
In any case, he had already made up his mind. Soon he was volunteering information about his associates in the KGB's local office and disclosing how Soviet officers were listening in on FBI transmissions.
His American handlers were confident that he was not feeding them disinformation. "He couldn't lie," said one of them, Bill Smits, since retired, "because he didn't know how much we knew."
Yuzhin says he was not motivated by money, and Smits says the FBI did not pay Yuzhin at the time. As for any financial arrangements later, the bureau declines as a matter of policy to discuss them, and Yuzhin is also silent.
He had one close, if comic, brush with disaster. The FBI had given him a new spy camera concealed in a cigarette lighter. He put it in his back pocket and, within hours, lost it - in the auditorium of the Soviet Consulate, as it turned out.
It was found by a handyman who, trying to light a flame, took four pictures of his own face and soon discovered the gadget's purpose. The KGB undertook a frantic mole hunt, matched by the FBI's equally frantic, and unsuccessful, effort to recover the device. But Yuzhin escaped immediate suspicion.
On another occasion, FBI agents say, Yuzhin snapped photos with a miniature camera inside the local KGB office, unaware that he was also photographing a reflection of himself in a mirror. That accident meant that his role as an American agent might now be known not only by his handlers in the highly compartmentalized world of counterintelligence but also by anyone who happened to gain access to the photos. It was an accident that may have led to Yuzhin's undoing: People familiar with Ames' debriefings by the FBI say that at some point he apparently became aware of it.
Meanwhile, Yuzhin continued supplying information, managing, Smits said, to "Xerox the annual report of the KGB political branch" and smuggling out crucial cable traffic. He also tipped the FBI to the existence of a Soviet spy somewhere "up north," a lead that helped Norway break the espionage case of a Foreign Ministry official, Arne Treholt, arrested in 1984 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. "It was one case we were giving up on," Smits said.
In 1982, apparently as a matter of routine, Yuzhin was called home for debriefing and what turned out to be a series of lackluster assignments in Moscow. Before he left, the CIA tried to arrange for contact with him there. But he refused, fearing it too risky.
On Dec. 23, 1986, he was summoned by his chief and ordered to the airport for an errand. There, he said, he was shoved into a room, handcuffed and held incommunicado on charges of high treason. His wife, Nadya, had had no inkling of his double life and was as stunned as anyone, she said in an interview here, speaking in halting English.
He had been under suspicion and surveillance for some time, he learned later. A video camera had even been hidden in his Moscow apartment, recording his every conversation and intimate moment with his family.
Yet his interrogators' questioning, Yuzhin says, showed that some of their information was spotty. He could, in fact, refute accusations that he had been in contact with the CIA after returning to Moscow. As for the rest, he said, "I painted a terrible picture of the FBI," contending that the bureau had exploited him ruthlessly, a portrayal that he said the Soviet authorities were predisposed to accept.