Arkady Shevchenko

Arkady Nikolayevich Shevchenko
Arkady Shevchenko, 1984
Allegiance	Soviet Union then American
Service	Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Soviet Union) then CIA
Born	October 11, 1930 Horlivka
Died	February 28, 1998(1998-02-28) (aged 67) Washington, DC.
Cause of death	cirrhosis of the liver
Alma mater	Moscow State Institute of International Relations

Arkady Nikolayevich Shevchenko (Ukrainian: Аркадій Миколайович Шевченко October 11, 1930 – February 28, 1998), a Soviet diplomat, was the highest-ranking Soviet official to defect to the West.

Shevchenko joined the diplomatic service of the Soviet Union, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as a young man and rose through its ranks, becoming advisor to Andrei Gromyko, Minister for Foreign Affairs. In 1973 he was appointed Under Secretary General (USG) of the United Nations. During his assignment at the UN headquarters in New York City Shevchenko began passing Soviet secrets to the CIA. In 1978 he cut his ties to the Soviet Union and defected to the United States.

Shevchenko was born in the town of Horlivka, eastern Ukrainian SSR, but when he was five years old his family moved to Yevpatoria, a resort town in Crimea on the Black Sea, where his physician father was the administrator of a tuberculosis sanatorium. When the Crimea was overrun by German forces in 1941, he and his mother, along with the patients in the sanatorium, were evacuated to Torgai in the Altai mountains of Siberia. The family was reunited in 1944 after the Germans were driven out of the Crimea.