The World - News from May 7, 1989

Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko says the CIA helped the KGB clamp down on Soviet dissidents in 1966 in order to divert world attention from the U.S. bombing of Vietnam. In an article in the Soviet weekly Ogonyok, Yevtushenko recounts how Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) told him that the U.S. intelligence service had given its Soviet rival the pseudonyms of dissident writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky. Both were prosecuted with alleged CIA evidence. Yevtushenko wrote he learned of the alleged CIA involvement when he was invited to the senator’s New York headquarters during a visit to the United States in November, 1966.