Soviets Hint Defector Was KGB Plant in U.S.

The Soviet Union said Tuesday that a U.S. Navy intelligence specialist who was granted asylum here last year as a “defector” fleeing political persecution in the United States had actually been a longtime Soviet spy--and suggested that he may even have been sent to America as a Russian infiltrator while still a teen-ager.

Announcing the “sudden death” of Glenn Michael Souther at the age of 32, an official obituary in the Soviet Defense Ministry newspaper Red Star described him as a “Soviet intelligence agent” and an officer of the KGB, the Soviet intelligence and security service.

Russian Name in Obituary

But the obituary, signed by the leadership of the Committee for State Security, as the KGB is formally known, identified him as “Mikhail Yevgenyevich Orlov (Glenn Michael Souther)”--a formulation clearly suggesting that the Russian name was his real identity.

This raised the possibility that Orlov-Souther, who joined the U.S. Navy in January, 1975, at the age of 18, had been infiltrated into the United States as a teen-age Soviet agent.

“M. Y. Orlov had a short but full and brilliant life, which was totally devoted to the struggle for removing the threat of nuclear war looming over mankind and for a better life for ordinary people,” the prominently placed obituary said.

“Over a long period, he performed important special missions and made a major contribution to ensuring the state security of the Soviet Union. This struggle demanded great personal bravery, requiring all his physical and moral strength. . . .

“The clear memory of a brave intelligence agent, a man commited to his international duties, a gifted, opened-hearted and kind man, will remain forever in the thankful hearts of the Soviet people.”

The obituary in Red Star did not explain Orlov-Souther’s death at such a young age.

However, Britain’s Guardian newspaper today quoted KGB chief Vladimir A. Kryuchkov in an interview from Moscow as saying that the man, driven by “massive nervous tension,” killed himself.

“It was a tragic thing. He committed suicide,” Kryuchkov was quoted as saying. “He was buried yesterday. He leaves a Russian wife and daughter.”

Kryuchkov added: “He had felt bad for some time. He was under massive nervous tension because he worked for a long time in very difficult conditions.”

But the cause of death was perhaps the least of the issues raised by the obituary’s publication.

The key question remains--as it was when Souther disappeared in May, 1986, after graduating from Old Dominion University in Virginia: Was he a Soviet spy and, if so, for how long?

If he was a Soviet agent, as FBI counterintelligence agents apparently suspected, was he an American? When he enlisted in the Navy, Souther said he had been born on Jan. 30, 1957, in Hammond, Ind., and went to Greely High School in Cumberland, Me. Or was he a Soviet “sleeper” assigned at a very young age, perhaps only 16 or 17, to infiltrate the U.S. intelligence services?

And, whether he was a defector, a recruited American agent or one of the fabled Soviet “sleepers,” why did the KGB decide to announce his death, particularly in such a prominent manner?

“Secrecy is the byword for an intelligence service, and the KGB is as secrecy-conscious as any of them,” a senior West European diplomat commented Tuesday. “The more successful an operation, the more you try to keep it secret. And so the question arises, ‘Why are they telling us this?’

“Is this a sort of ‘Gotcha!’ signal from one intelligence service to another?” the diplomat asked. “Is it a more serious sort of signal, perhaps one that implies that Orlov-Souther’s death was . . . well, not quite natural? Maybe he was found to be a double agent and was eliminated. Or is it a political signal that says, more metaphorically, ‘We in the KGB are not going to play such games any longer’? Or maybe they have just given Souther a Russian name to drive the Americans crazy wondering about a guy who may, after all, just have been a plain old defector.

“Whoever Glenn Michael Souther or Mikhail Yevgenyevich Orlov was or were--or maybe still is, or are, for how do we know anyone has died?--he may well mean much more in death than he did in life.”

No Answers in Obituary

The obituary in Red Star provided no answers to any of these questions, but a photograph of Orlov-Souther, taken when he was probably in his early 20s, accompanied the obituary, strengthening the suggestion that he had long been a Soviet agent.

When he surfaced in Moscow last July, FBI spokesmen in Washington said that Souther had served in the U.S. Navy for nearly eight years, from 1975 to late 1982, and left as a petty officer first class after serving aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz in the Mediterranean, then on the 6th Fleet’s headquarters staff and finally at the headquarters of the Naval Air Training Command.

Interviewed on Soviet television last July after he was formally granted “political asylum,” Souther said that he had worked most of that time as an intelligence analyst, assessing photographs of possible targets taken from space by reconnaissance satellites. He had also worked, he said, as an aide to the 6th Fleet commander. He had special security clearances for all these jobs, he said.

After leaving the Navy, he studied Russian language and literature and Soviet affairs at Old Dominion University and, as an active naval reservist, worked part time as an analyst at the Naval Intelligence Center in Norfolk, Va., again evaluating photographs taken by reconnaissance satellites. He again had a special security clearance, he said.

The account that Souther gave a year ago, in two lengthy interviews on Soviet television and another in the government newspaper Izvestia, conflicts sharply with his portrayal as a longtime Soviet agent.

As Souther, who spoke and acted and appeared to think as an American, explained his defection to the Soviet Union, the decision to seek political asylum here had developed from a growing disenchantment with U.S. foreign policy.

He told of his “persecution” at Old Dominion by students belonging to the Young Republicans organization on campus, of his interrogations by the FBI, of the hostility he faced simply for his love of Russian poetry.

His former wife, with whom he had a son, reportedly alerted U.S. counterintelligence to his activities while he was in the Navy.

“Glenn Souther understood that he was to be treated as an enemy of the nation and even a Russian spy,” an Izvestia correspondent wrote in a long and flattering profile of him. “His destiny now was to be under the surveillance of the CIA and the FBI for his whole life.

In his interviews with the Soviet press, Orlov-Souther seemed to be yet another American who had come to believe in the promises of socialism to the point where his political allegiances had shifted. Three or four times a year, the Soviet government announces such a “defection,” although most of those granted “asylum” return to the United States within two years.

He complained to his interviewers of some initial problems settling in and finding a proper job but expressed strong optimism about the “new life” he had found in the Soviet Union.

U.S. Embassy officials interviewed Souther last August, and a spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry said that he had reaffirmed that his decision to seek political asylum here was “voluntary and considered.”