By Barry Schweid
AP Diplomatic Writer
Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2001; 4:42 p.m. EST

WASHINGTON –– A Russian diplomat working at his government's mission to the United Nations in New York quietly defected with his family last October, two U.S. officials said Tuesday.

The diplomat, Sergey Tretyakov, was first secretary at the mission. He defected with his wife, Elena Tretyakova, and other members of the family, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

According to their account, Tretyakov expressed an interest in remaining in the United States and was put in touch with U.S. officials. No further details were immediately available, such as what the legal basis would be for defection from a country that has shed its totalitarian past.

While close to a dozen first secretaries are posted at the Russian mission in New York's fashionable upper East Side, there were unconfirmed reports that Tretyakov was a senior aide to Russia's veteran U.N. ambassador, Sergey Lavrov.

Coincidentally, and apparently unrelated to the Tretyakov defection, Secretary of State Colin Powell had his first conversation Tuesday with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the telephone conversation "was a good beginning." In Moscow, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Ivanov and Powell agreed to meet "in the near future for the purpose of exchanging views on the entire range of Russian-American cooperation." The ministry said the conversation was "warm and constructive."

There was no explanation Tuesday why a Russian diplomat, Tretyakov, would defect in the post-Cold War era as the United States and Russia are not at ideological loggerheads.

Cold War defections were dramatic.

Arkady Shevchenko, a top Soviet diplomat who defected to the United States in 1978, said in his memoirs in 1985 that he had spied for the CIA for more than 2½ years before his defection.

Shevchenko delivered secrets to the United States that included a position paper from negotiations to reduce U.S. and Russian arsenals of long-range nuclear warheads, according to reports in 1985.

Shevchenko, a protege of Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister until mid-1985, first approached the United States and asked to defect in 1975. He was at the time an undersecretary-general at the United Nations in New York.

The CIA, wanting to test his loyalty, put him to work for the United States, Shevchenko said,

"I never had an idea of a long period of spying, but since I was several months with them, ... they could even betray me to the Soviets. I was actually in their hands," he said.

Only a handful of top American officials knew that Shevchenko was working for the United States, among them Daniel Moynihan, the former U.S. Senator from New York who was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1975.

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On the Net: Link to Russian mission at the United Nations: http://www.un.int/russia/

State Department site on former Soviet republics: http://www.state.gov/www/regions/nis/index.html