Career
He was a mole in the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security), spying for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1970s and 1980s before being caught and imprisoned. Yuzhin was assigned by the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) to monitor student activities under the cover of a Tass correspondent. In 1978 he began working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He revealed the existence of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security)"s Group North, an "elite unit of senior Soviet intelligence officers who specialized in recruiting American and Canadian targets worldwide." Yuzhin would take pictures of sensitive documents using a tiny Central Intelligence Agency camera disguised as a cigarette lighter.
His information led to the arrest of Arne Treholt, a Norwegian diplomat who was spying for the Soviets.
Yuzhin worked at the Soviet Consulate General in San Francisco, California. The Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) discovered that Yuzhin was a mole in 1985, first when Central Intelligence Agency officer Aldrich Ames identified him (as well as Valery F Martinov and Sergei Motorin, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) officers based in the Soviet embassy in Washington), and later when Federal Bureau of Investigation mole Robert Hanssen confirmed that the three were working for United States. intelligence a few months later, in his first letter to his Soviet handlers on October 1, 1985. Martinov and Motorin, who were more junior Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security), were recalled to Moscow and executed.
Yuzhin had returned to Moscow for reassignment in 1982 and was arrested in 1986. He spent six years of a 15-year sentence in Permanent 35, a Siberian prison.
According to one of Yuzhin"s former Federal Bureau of Investigation handlers, Yuzhin escaped execution because he was "never in residency in the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) offices" and was able to "convince his interrogators he knew nothing about operations and cases." He was released on February 7, 1992 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when President Boris Yeltsin issued a general amnesty for political prisoners.
Yuzhin immigrated to the United States, where the Federal Bureau of Investigation helped him resettle in the San Francisco Bay area. Ames was captured on February 21, 1994 — Yuzhin"s birthday. The day before Hanssen"s arrest on February 18, 2001, Yuzhin received "a cryptic call" from an Federal Bureau of Investigation contact telling him to "watch the news tomorrow."
Yuzhin has also worked with Susan Mesinai and the Ark Project on researching the cases of other former Soviet political prisoners, including Raoul Wallenberg and National Security Agency cryptanalyst Victor Norris Hamilton, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963 and was discovered in a Russian psychiatric hospital in 1992.