THE WASHINGTON POST !

Sunday, October 4, 1981

Ex-Agent Says KGB
Trying to Kill Him,
CIA Refuses Help
By Joseph Volz

New York Daily News
Boris Korczak has been looking over his shoulder ever since he found out two years ago that Soviet intelligence agents were out to kill him.

The Russians had good reason: Korczak, a Lithuanian-Pole, had betrayed them. Working as a contact agent for the CIA, he had infiltrated the- soviet intelligence service, the KGB.

A few weeks ago, in a shopping center three miles from CIA headquarters in suburban Virginia Korczak says the Russians caught up with him.

He felt a slight sting, “something like a mosquito bite in the area of his kidney A few hours later at home, his temperature shot up to 106 degrees, ”and I became delirious’
Then his temperature dropped sharply and it kept fluctuating for next three days.

“I started bleeding internally. In fact, I thought I was having a heart attack. One arm went numb and my heart was beating iregularly, he told a reporter last week.

But doctors could find no reason for Korczak’s mysterious disease. And, just as suddenly as they had come, all of his symptoms left. It wasn’t until a few days later that Korczak figured- out what might have happened to him. He excreted a microscopic metal ball, only about one five hundredth the size of a fingernail.
“That ball has a niche that was filled with some deadly poison which got into my kidneys when the ball lodged there,’ Korczak said.

“My friends they saw a blond man, wearing British clothes, who seemed to be following us around the shopping center. I believe he shot the pellet at me.’
If Korczak was, in fact, the target of a sophisticated KGB murder plot, it would be the first publicly known effort by the Soviet intelligence agency to kill a CIA operative, on US. soil.

But Korczak’s story has another element, and it is the reason he decided to go public. He believes that not only is the KGB tracking him, but that the CIA has abandoned him. The agency refused to pay his expenses in fleeing Europe and so far :has been unwilling to provide him with US. citizenship, a common CIA procedure to aid agents whose covers have been blown.

A CIA spokesman had no comment on Korczak’s complaint. But when asked, agency officials told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Korczak had been a CIA agent. They insisted, however, that they had lived up to their agreement with him, which they said did not include U.S. citizenship.

Korczak was a successful importer in Denmark and had been a CIA double agent for eight years when he found out the KGB was after him. He bays he is virtually penniless and dependent on his friends here.

Korczak fled to the United States on his own’ with his young son in 1979. His business visa has expired and he is worried that he could be deported to Europe. He feels that would mean certain death for him