Russian defense worker charges CIA drugged, recruited him

MOSCOW -- A Russian government defense employee at the center of the latest spy scandal with the United States was drugged and recruited by the CIA while seeking information about long-lost relatives, he said on state-run television Sunday.

The employee, identified only as Viktor, told RTR television he was trying to fulfill his dying father's wish to contact relatives who fled to the United States decades earlier and wrote a letter back. That letter in the 1950s was ignored at the KGB's request.

Viktor's face was blacked out during Sunday's broadcast.

Russia's Federal Security Service, the main successor to the KGB, said last week it foiled an alleged U.S. espionage effort involving Viktor. The accusations came after a string of spy scandals in recent years and amid preparations for a U.S.-Russian presidential summit next month.

In the interview with RTR, Viktor said he decided against contacting the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to fulfill his father's wish last year because he works for a Russian Defense Ministry installation and thought such a visit would raise suspicion.

Going to embassy

Instead, he approached an embassy in another ex-Soviet republic. The FSB has not named which country.

Embassy employees promised to help Viktor and arranged another meeting.

"I started to understand in the middle of the conversation that they were trying to recruit me," Viktor told RTR. "But I cannot describe how the conversation ended or how I ended up at the Russian Embassy."

Viktor later was found on a public bench suffering from shock and amnesia, RTR said. The Russian Embassy sent him to Moscow, where the FSB concluded that U.S. officers had slipped him psychotropic drugs in drinks and cookies in an effort to extract information. Under FSB control, Viktor then received instructions and secret packets from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The Russian security service identified Viktor's contact as Yunju Kensinger, a third secretary in the embassy's consular department, and reported its discoveries to the U.S. Embassy.

CIA officials and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow have declined to comment on the allegations, which were first reported last week.