During his assignment at the UN headquarters, in New York City, Shevchenko began to pass Soviet secrets to the CIA because he could not objectively fulfill his mission of impartiality to the United Nations.

When Crimea was invaded by German forces in 1941, he, his mother, and the sanatorium patients were evacuated to Torgai, in the Altay Mountains of Siberia.

He later recalled how his father attended the Yalta Conference, in part on orders to observe and report on the health of US President Franklin Roosevelt.

In 1958, he was sent to New York City on a three-month assignment to represent the Soviet Union at the annual UN General Assembly as a disarmament specialist.

The next year, he accepted an assignment as Chief of the Soviet Mission's Security Council and Political Affairs Division at the United Nations.

Although he was nominally employed by the United Nations and owed his allegiance to the international organization, he was in practice expected to support and to promote Soviet aims and policies.

He also came to believe that the Soviet's internal economic policies and their insistence on hard-line communist centralization of power were depriving the Russian people of their freedom and ability to better themselves and their country.

His long years of exposure to Western democracies convinced him that the Soviets were "taking the wrong path" economically and politically.

Although fearful of the consequences if he were to be found out by the KGB, he reluctantly agreed with the idea that if he wanted to fight against the regime's existence, that was an opportunity to do so in a way with real effect or power.

Shevchenko surmised that in trying to gain leverage in her predicament, she may have threatened senior party members with exposure of their corruption, which made killing her the easiest solution.

[3] From 1978 to his death 20 years later in Bethesda, Maryland, in the United States, Shevchenko lived and supported himself by written contributions to various publications and on the lecture circuit.

In 1985, he published his autobiography, Breaking With Moscow in which he described Soviet Russia as, among other things, a gangster economy in which the KGB played a prominent role.