It was 1985, the so-called “Year of the Spy”. The CIA had been losing Soviet assets left and right; the first loss seemed like bad luck, but four in a row? That wasn't a coincidence— it was a deadly leak. And just as the Agency was scrambling to find answers, across the world, a KGB colonel named Vitaly Yurchenko walked into the American embassy in Rome and volunteered his services in exchange for immediate exfiltration to the United States.
At the time, Yurchenko was the highest-ranked KGB officer ever to defect to America, and the Agency felt it had hit the jackpot. Instead, his defection would go on to become one of the most dizzying, high-stakes espionage debacles of the last century. Although many of his bombshell revelations were bonafide, a doubt soon began haunting the intelligence community: Was Vitaly Yurchenko telling the whole truth? And if not... What had he been sent to hide?
