The most interesting fact about Arkady N. Shevchenko who defected from the United Nations to the United States earlier this month is not Russian embarrassment caused by the loss of their high-ranking official. It is not even that he is seeking American freedom at the cost of giving up his prestigious $76,000-a-year job in New York City.
The most interesting aspect about Shevchenko is that he is the eleventh consecutive Communist to hold the second most important position in the UN Secretariat. His predecessors starting in 1945 were Arkady Sobolev, Constantin E. Zinchenko, Ilya S. Tchernychev, Dragoslav Protitch, Anatoly Dobrynin, Georgy Petrovitch Arkadev, Eugeny Kiselev, Vladimir P. Suslov, Alexi Efremovitch Nesternko, and Leonid N. Kutakov.
All were Russians except the one Yugoslav, Dragoslav Protitch, who was permitted to hold the position for a brief time during the period of Tito’s total subservience to Moscow.
How did it happen that, although the United States hosts the UN and has always paid the largest share of UN costs, the Kremlin has had a monopoly on the UN position which is Number Two in rank and which many people believe is the most important because the Secretary General has so many time-consuming ceremonial duties?
This Soviet monopoly over the post of Under Secretary General for Political and Security Council Affairs is the result of a secret agreement made between Molotov and the U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius (when Alger Hiss was one of his advisers) in London in 1945. This was revealed in the book written by the second UN Secretary General, Trygve Lie, called In the Cause of Peace.
That wasn’t the only secret agreement with the Soviets made by our State Department during the months when it was selling the United Nations to the American people as the last best hope for peace. Another secret agreement was made at Yalta between President Franklin Roosevelt (where Alger Hiss was one of his advisers) and Joseph Stalin to give the Soviet Union three votes in the UN General Assembly while every other nation has only one.
The Department of Political and Security Council Affairs, which Shevchenko had headed for nearly five years at the time of his defection, has control over all UN military, political, nuclear, and disarmament questions. Soviet tenure in this sensitive post was particularly valuable in giving the Kremlin access to our military plans during the Korean War.
The highest-ranking Russian ever to defect to the West, Shevchenko undoubtedly has a wide and deep knowledge of Soviet military, political and economic activities. He could probably give us more secret strategic information in a week’s testimony than all our CIA intelligence agents could uncover in several years.
Shevchenko’s first-hand testimony could rank with the immensely valuable intelligence provided to the United States in 1961 and 1962 by Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, the Soviet missile expert, scientific committee chairman and intelligence officer. After sending us vital military secrets which enabled President Kennedy to stand up to the Russians during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Penkovskiy was caught by the Soviets in November 1962 and executed six months later.
Shevchenko would be a sensational star witness and should be summoned by a Congressional committee. He provides a splendid new reason for the House to hurry up and pass the bill sponsored by Congressmen John Ashbrook (R.,0.) and Larry McDonald (D.,Ga.) to reactivate the House Internal Security Committee.
