Au Pied de Cochon, a French bistro at 1335 Wisconsin Avenue NW in Georgetown, is where the KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko walked away from the CIA on the evening of Saturday 2 November 1985. Yurchenko had defected at the American embassy in Rome on 1 August and been brought to the United States for debriefing. Over dinner he told his CIA escort that he was going for a walk, and that if he did not come back it would not be the escort's fault. He did not come back.
He made his way to the Soviet compound on Mount Alto, about a mile and a quarter to the north. On Monday 4 November he appeared at a press conference arranged by the Soviets and said he had been abducted in Rome, drugged and held by the CIA at a country estate in Virginia. On 6 November he flew home from Dulles on an Aeroflot plane, less than two weeks before Reagan and Gorbachev met at Geneva. Whether he had been a genuine defector who changed his mind or a plant sent to mislead the CIA is still argued over.
The bistro, opened by Yves Courbois in 1976 and open around the clock, afterwards served a Yurchenko Shooter of Stolichnaya and Grand Marnier. It closed in 2004, and the building, from about 1890, has since housed a run of fast-casual restaurants.
Getting there
38.9075, -77.0632
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