67. The Great Betrayal: Defecting to Moscow (Ep 2)

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I'm going to give it some drama.

Get ready.

Give it some twang.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can't do twang.

I'm not doing accents.

Well, I'll give it drama rather than accents.

There we go.

Good German accent for no reason.

I've calculated.

We neared the junction of Canyon Road and Old People's Trail near St.

John's College in Santa Fe.

This was where the road dipped, turned to the right with substantial hedges planted along the right side.

As we came up to the jump point I turned and looked at Mary.

Her face was serious and her eyes were moist with tears.

Our marriage marriage and our love were both on the line.

Goodbye, babe, I said, and Mary slowed to five miles an hour.

I moved to the outboard side of the seat, flipped up the dummy, put my hat on it, opened the door, jumped out, and shoved the door closed as I jumped.

I tried to hit the ground running, but landed hard and rolled into the bushes.

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McCloskey.

And that was Edward Edward Lee Howard in his memoir describing a dramatic moment we're going to be coming to in this episode.

It is not the best piece of prose ever written, is it, David?

You know what?

It makes me want a shirt that has his face on it that just says goodbye, babe, on it.

I mean, it just shows not every former CIA officer can write, David.

It makes me.

Yeah, it does make me feel better as a writer, Gordon.

I mean, I feel, you know, I feel terrible that he ends up betraying the agency, but I feel secure that I can write

slightly better than he can.

I hope.

I hope.

Dear God, I hope.

Yeah, I think your novel, which I'm just going to plug, Seventh Floor Out in Paperback in the

has slightly better prose than Edward Lee Howard managed in his memoir.

So that is saying something, by the way.

That's a compliment.

So we left Edward Lee Howard last time, and he'd been expelled.

in his words, dramatically and suddenly, but clearly for some reasons from the CIA, just before he was going on this prize posting to Moscow, having already been briefed on some of the CIA's deepest secrets in Moscow.

And it's fair to say he's going to seek out his revenge as his life kind of spiraled out of control.

And there's plenty of drink and drugs last time, and there's going to be more this time.

So if you're playing the drinking game, the Edward Lee Howe drinking game, get ready.

Which is a hard game to play, I guess, in the way we've done it, because we're not actually talking about specific moments where he's actually taking a drink of something.

So it's just sort of a general make yourself a nice drink, but don't do anything stupid.

You know, we would say, as we're not encouraging illicit behavior or irresponsible behavior on this podcast.

So he's in shock, isn't he?

He's been thrown out the CIA and he's in a bad way, isn't he, David?

He's in a bad way, and he's going to be in an even worse way, Gordon, because he's moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

That's a bad thing.

Breaking bad.

Yet another breaking bad connection on this podcast.

It's downright spooky at this point.

So he's going to get a job in Albuquerque as an economist with the state government.

Now, he is really angry at the CIA, which I guess makes sense.

He's drinking heavily in this period because he is so angry and depressed.

And he starts to do some weird things.

So, one of them is he begins to make drunken calls from New Mexico to the U.S.

Embassy in Moscow, which is not what you're supposed to do.

He leaves messages for CIA officers working undercover there.

And in one instance, he leaves a message for COS Moscow, our chief of station in Moscow, saying that he won't be showing up for his physical.

Now,

which, of course, COS Moscow already knows because COS, he would have been in the pipeline for Moscow.

He's pulled from the pipeline.

The chief of station in Moscow very clearly understands that Edward Lee Howard is not showing up.

for his physical.

So it raises this question of why in the world Edward Lee Howard is calling the station in Moscow.

Because that is a line which the Russians, the Soviets, would be tapping.

The KGB would be tapping that line and they are going to hear someone calling up.

Now, to me, that feels like it is someone either who's gone nuts or who is trying to signal potentially to the KGB that he is someone who knows secrets and is a loose cannon.

So to me, that feels like he's already got this idea when he's doing that, that he wants to either approach the KGB or be approached by the KGB.

Because, I mean, I know with, you know, for instance, Oleg Gordievsky at one point has a phone call, I think, with someone in which he says something deliberately kind of suggesting he is unhappy with Soviet policy.

I think it's after the Prague Spring.

And he does it knowing the line is tapped, hoping that it will get attention to him.

So I feel like Howard is doing this at this point.

I think that is undoubtedly what he is doing.

And I think his behavior to come will suggest that he is certainly not risk averse and he's willing to take massive risks, but he's not nuts, right?

He's not some lunatic.

I mean, he might be doing these things because he's drinking heavily, is probably contributing to this, right?

He's in a fog in this period.

But if you want the KGB to know that A, you've been fired and B, you know everybody in Moscow and know a lot of interesting information about the station in Moscow and thereby might know some things about assets that the station is running in Moscow.

This is a great way to do that, right?

Is to call these numbers and basically indicate that you're interested in being contacted.

And the Soviets, by the way, they would have known that he was being slated to arrive.

They wouldn't have known that he was CIA, but they would have put in at that point for his, you know, his visa.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the CIA

should realize at this point that he is a major problem, he being Howard, but Gordon, and this is, you know, this is classic, classic CIA fee behavior here.

The CIA doesn't tell the FBI, right?

They don't tell the feebs.

They don't tell the feebs.

Because they don't like them.

They don't just

want to tell the feebs, right?

They don't want to admit.

I think they don't want to admit they've got a guy who's a problem, and that's going to preoccupy them.

So Edward Lee Howard has put out this kind of come get me notice to the KGB.

The CIA probably

should have told the FBI, but they don't.

And in February of 1984, there's another weird incident.

So, like all good nights in New Mexico, it starts with Edward Lee Howard having about six beers at a bar and planning to go shooting, right?

Because that's obviously what you would do after you drink six beers.

We should also note, Edward Lee Howard is a bit of a gun nut.

He's a gun enthusiast, which would not be uncommon living in the American West, certainly, right?

But he's very drunk, he's wasted.

He goes to a bar, which is also a fun thing to do, I guess, after you have six beers in Santa Fe.

So he goes to a bar and he stares at

another gentleman's girlfriend in what seems like a very leering and suggestive way.

And then he follows this couple out of the bar, tailgates them as they're driving home.

And I guess Edward Lee Howard is also driving his car, which seems ill-advised.

These guys drop the girl off.

And then, of course, because Howard has been following them, they're like, what is this guy doing?

They have a confrontation in which Howard pulls out a 44 Magnum, which is the dirty hairy gun, by the way, from the film.

Yeah, because

apparently, Edward Lee Howard says, and here Callum should get his bleep gun ready.

He says, this is a Magnum, and I don't give a.

And then he threatens the guys,

and he asks where the girl is, which also seems insane.

And the guys initially try to back off because, of course, this lunatic has just pulled the dirty hairy gun on them but howard trains the gun on him there are shots that end up getting fired howard ends up in a headlock the gun gets taken and one of the guys apparently hits him on the head with a rock i like the fact even though he's the one with a 44 magnum he's the one who ends up in a headlock he loses the fight the mid 80s are sort of a dark period for edwardly howard i think this is a rough patch.

This is slightly spiraling out of control, isn't it?

I mean, you know, he's gone from CIA officer to Moscow to a drunk to getting into a fight with people, you know.

These guys work at Pizza Hut.

He's getting in a drunken brawl with Pizza Hut employees.

But it is a really important moment in Edward Lee Howard's journey to eventually commit espionage because I think his secret self in some ways bursts out into the open, right?

In public at this point, he's an economist working at the state government of New Mexico.

He's drinking too much, but he's a respectable guy in the eyes of pretty much everybody in the community, right, at this point.

Like, nobody knows why he's left the CIA.

His resume wouldn't even say CIA.

Nobody would have any clue that he had been fired.

And now all of a sudden, he's gotten into a brawl with a gun with Pizza Hut employees out in the open.

And he gets five years' probation.

And I really think that what comes next maybe doesn't happen without the fight and the arrest because the CIA then reaches out and offer psychiatric care.

There's a court-appointed psychologist who delivers a treatment plan to Edward Lee Howard that apparently includes deep breathing exercises and self-hypnosis, which he probably needs because

at this point, Howard's in-laws have moved in with him for like months, and they'd moved in prior to the arrest.

So this home environment can't be great.

He's got his in-laws there.

He's got a young kid.

You know, he's been fired from the CIA.

He's drinking way too much.

He's under a lot of stress.

He ends up having to borrow $7,500 from his in-laws to pay the kid whose car he has shot up and to pay for his own therapy, his court order therapy, right?

So this is a bad sitch, Gordon.

And things are bad would be the title of this chapter in the Edward Lee Howard story.

And he's going to get more and more thirsty.

for revenge.

And it's very interesting, isn't it?

It's the exact

chronology of how and when he approaches the KGB and the Soviets is a little bit murky, isn't it?

He's obscured it purposefully.

Yeah.

Because he claims he never approaches them in the US himself.

And he, I think, admits at one point that he sits outside the Soviet consulate in Washington in October 83, debating whether to go in or not, which is...

It's an odd thing to do.

Which is an odd thing to do.

And he claims that he didn't go in.

But, you know, his claims that he never contacted them in in the US are slightly contradicted by the memoir of a KGB officer based in the US, Viktor Chakashin.

You've always got to be slightly careful about KGB memoirs, but he seems to suggest that there was a contact that Howard actually does walk in.

So I think the indications are that he is going to kind of walk in, even if he's going to deny it.

Well, in that chronology, which I think makes some sense.

Howard may have sent the signals and maybe nothing happens.

And so he essentially walks in to the consulate in DC.

And frankly,

he would have known, I think, Gordon, probably the surveillance, or maybe would have had some insight into the surveillance schedules that the FBI may have had on the consulate.

So he could have timed walking in when there wouldn't have been FBI eyes and ears outside to see what's going on outside, right?

And so he's...

particularly uniquely positioned to walk in to the Soviet consulate than anybody else, right?

And And that would have been a great way to kind of make the KGB aware of what he wanted to do.

And it's a huge moment, isn't it?

Because he is going from suggesting he might be interested to actually crossing the line from being a kind of dropout who's a huge mess to being a traitor.

This is the moment.

You know, you are a former CIA officer full of secrets and you are walking into the Soviet consulate in Washington, D.C.

But that does seem to be the moment he finally does that.

And then I think the suggestion is that through that walk-in moment, they're going to realize he's interesting and there's going to be a plan then, because they obviously can't go on meeting in the U.S.

because it's too much surveillance.

Yeah, you don't want to do the meet in the US.

No, you don't want to meet in the U.S.

So he's going to go on holiday, I think, to Europe, isn't he?

And that's where the contact is really going to begin, it looks like.

Yeah, it seems it was the fall, probably September of 84.

He takes a trip.

Apparently, he cashes in his life insurance policy to pay for it, probably because he presumed he was going to get paid on the back end of it by the Russians.

But he takes Mary and their son on a trip to Switzerland, Italy, and Austria in September of 84.

And it's probably

the case that somewhere on this trip, probably Vienna, he meets the Russians, right?

And that meeting is hugely significant because he is now crossing over into a very infamous group, small group of CIA officers who have ever committed treason.

Now, it's probably the case, and David Wise, the journalist, has written an account of Edward Lee Howard's life and times that I think is more accurate than Edward Lee Howard's own memoir.

He says that Howard may have fabricated the existence of an economics conference in Milan and then used that as cover to sneak into Vienna for meetings with the KGB.

It seems that there's a few more meetings in early and mid-1985, right, where he's essentially being handled by the Russians, right?

Now, Howard doesn't have any new information, right?

He's not actually working at the CIA at this point,

but

he's got a lot of very valuable

stuff that the Russians want.

He probably gives away Tolkachev in one of these early meetings.

Again, probably doesn't know Tolkachev's real name.

But from reading those GT Sphere, which is Tolkachev's crypton, from reading those sphere reports, he probably would have had his address, right?

Where he worked, so plenty to identify him.

He gives up that sensitive cable tapping operation, the one where he had cheated by putting cardboard in his backpack instead of the weights.

That was exceptionally valuable.

It actually is enabling the CIA to listen in on communications between a nuclear weapons research institute and the Soviet Ministry of Defense, listening into really high-level conversations, right?

He blows that.

And in return, he gets money.

He's going to buy a Rolex.

He gets gold coins.

He gets Krugerans.

He opens a Swiss bank account that's later found to have $150,000 in it.

And to put that in perspective, it's about maybe four times what he's earning annually as an economist with the state government of New Mexico.

So, you know, it's a big chunk of change in the mid-80s.

$10,000 worth of those Krugerans end up in a metal box buried in the desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

So we have some buried treasure as part of the story as well.

And it looks like things are on the up and up, I guess, for Edward Lee Howard here.

He's sold another human being down the river for money, which is a really despicable money and revenge.

Money and revenge.

He gets to stick his middle finger up at the CIA, make some cash, right?

And the CIA, of course, at this point, know that he's deeply troubled, but the CIA doesn't know what he's doing.

But then,

in August of 1985, a KGB officer named Vitaly Yurchenko defects in Rome to the CIA.

And one of the very first questions that's going to be asked in any debriefing of a Russian intelligence officer who's come over to our side is, do you have any information about penetrations of our service, right?

So, do you know of any KGB penetrations inside the CIA?

And Yurchenko says yes.

Now, he doesn't know Edward Lee Howard's name, but he says that a CIA officer codenamed Robert had volunteered in the fall of 1984.

He doesn't know his real name, but he knows that this Robert had met the KGB in Vienna in the fall of 84, and that the officer had been preparing for, this is critical, the officer had been preparing for a posting in Moscow, but had been taken off that assignment and fired.

Well,

that

kind of narrows things down a little bit.

It does.

It's not going going to take a counterintelligence genius.

It's not going to take George Smiley to work out

that it's Edward Lee Howard.

I mean, that is as good as a smoking gun as you can get in this kind of investigation, isn't it?

I mean, it totally fits the description.

That's right.

And now the CIA finally tell the Febes

what's going on.

But, of course, at this point, he's already done his damage.

By September of 85, so a month or so after the agency has learned that Howard has in fact spied for the Russians, the FBI puts him under surveillance at home and they tap his phone.

And so the CIA are telling the FEEBs that Howard had been training for Moscow and that he had gone through, you know, this sort of rigorous denied areas operations course where he's trained against some of the most elite FBI surveillance and counter-surveillance.

groups in the Bureau, right?

And so they're saying, look, you need to put your best people on this.

And the Bureau the surveillance crew known as the Gs.

I think the full acronym is SSG.

It's like the special surveillance group.

Howard would have trained against them in the denied area operations course.

And the CIA says

you got to put the Gs on it.

The FBI doesn't, I think, do that.

They don't take this quite as seriously as the CIA seems to think they should.

And also, probably the Feebs are pissed because the CIA has been sitting on this.

And when they look at the chronology, they're probably thinking, well, this guy's already been out for a few years.

I mean, you could have told us, you know, but you didn't.

It ends up being the case that Howard spots

the surveillance right away, right?

Like right away.

So Howard mentions seeing a green sedan in his neighborhood, driven by a young guy with a baseball cap who looks like he's watching him.

It's kind of cruising slowly past Howard's house.

Apparently, it looks really angry when he's staring at Howard.

So Howard, you know, instantly is like, okay,

it hasn't, you know, something has gone wrong.

The feebs are watching me.

But, and here's the problem: is that there's not enough information

that the FBI can use to prosecute Howard.

Yeah, because I suppose all they've got is Yoshenko's lead and tip off him rather than any actual evidence of money or secrets being passed, which you'd need to prosecute.

That's right.

So they know it's him, but they don't have anything to get him with.

This, dear listeners/slash watchers of our show, is another point where Gordon Carrera in the notes said, let's not get hung up here on the legalese because I have a paragraph on the Espionage Act.

But I'm going to do it for spite anyway.

Do it.

Gordon looks so sad right now for the people not watching on video.

He hates what I talk about, the Espionage Act and Osama bin Laden's wives.

But the Espionage Act makes it hard to convict in espionage cases.

And it simply is because you have to basically demonstrate intent to commit espionage, and it means that they have to catch him in the act, right?

Because the Yurchenko

if you're the CIA, do you want that in the courts?

Do you want Yurchenko to actually stand up and testify?

Absolutely not, right?

I mean, it's not going to happen.

So the bar is really high.

The Feebes need to prove intent.

And what they decide to do is hope that they could actually get him to confess.

So the Feebes bring Edward Lee Howard into a meeting at the Hilton Hotel in Santa Fe.

And they show Howard Howard a picture of Oleg Gordievsky,

who has just affected to your island, Gordon, to Britain.

And it's interesting because they're going to suggest to him that Gordievsky knew about Howard and has

revealed that Howard's a spy.

Now, that's actually not true.

So they're bluffing, but they're using the fact Gordievsky is kind of out and it's public that he's out to try and kind of pressure him.

So it's bluffing him, basically, to try and get a confession from him.

But he doesn't crack, does he?

No.

No.

And again, I mean, he's, you know, he's gone through some basic training at the farm and FTC on how do you handle an interrogation.

So he's, you know, he's been through this before.

So Howard says

he needs time to find a lawyer, but in reality, Gordon, he's making other plans.

And so maybe there we take a break.

And when we come back, we'll see how Edward Lee Howard makes his great escape.

See you after the break.

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Welcome back, everybody.

It's September 1985.

Edward Lee Howard, former CIA man trained in spotting surveillance, knows the FBI are on to him for his contacts with Moscow.

And he and Mary are going to come up with a plan.

to try and do something which I guess the FBI never thought they'd manage, which is escape from under that surveillance.

Yes.

Well, and

they won't talk at home, they being Edward Lee Howard and Mary, because he figures the place is wiretapped, and he's right about that.

And he and Mary, though, start taking walks around the neighborhood, and they cook up a plan.

And we should say here, just a note on Mary, which is

she

becomes an accomplice in this plan,

but it's pretty unclear what, if anything, she knows about his espionage and what he's actually done.

I think, given his behavior in other parts of his life, he's probably lied to her too, or covered up elements of the truth.

But in any case, she becomes an accomplice in his effort to escape.

So

they set this plan.

And on the 20th of September, Edward Lee Howard delivers what his boss at the state legislature said was a really well-done, collected briefing with all kinds of charts and graphs on the economic outlook for the state.

So this guy is actually, he's not like crumpling under the pressure here, right?

He's doing a really good PowerPoint.

Great PowerPoint in the midst of adversity, right?

But meanwhile, at home, Mary is preparing a dummy, which is a crucial element to the plan.

And there's a great quote from Howard's autobiography where he says, Mary had a white styrofoam head she used to put wigs on.

I got a broomstick and cut it to a meter and took a coat hanger and wired it to the pole.

For the hair, I used a brown wig I had for my agency training, which, just as a side note, Gordon, you're not supposed to take the disguises with you when you leave.

Okay, that's also frowned upon.

So

his petty thievery

knows no bounds.

The dummy required some clothes as well.

I put a Calvin Klein field jacket on the dummy.

Listeners might wonder why in the world they're preparing a dummy.

This is a piece of spy tech that they're building called a jib, a jack-in-the-box, which is actually being used at this time by case officers who are handling Adolf Tolkachev, the spy that he gave up, in Moscow.

And it is a really wonderful and colorful piece of spy tech, which has its origins.

Like the Office of Technical Service, the spy gadget people at the agency originally built one of these by going to sex shops in DC and getting dummies to kind of construct

the initial model.

That's what they told their bosses, at least.

Yeah, that's right.

Why have you been going to all these shops?

It works.

Again, again, again.

But the dummy was constructed basically so that if a case officer is conducting a surveillance detection route in Moscow, and they happen to be in a vehicle, if they can get into the gap, meaning they've got even 10, 15, 15, 30 seconds where they know that they're not under surveillance because they've taken maybe a hard turn or whatever and the surveillance team is behind them, the case officer could bail out of the car and this dummy could be inflated.

And they worked up very interesting ways to get them to inflate out of briefcases or cakes and things like that.

So it would inflate and it would look like there's somebody still in the car, right?

And so, even though the case officer has bailed out, right?

And is going to go take the meeting.

So this is exactly what Mary and Edward Lee Howard have built in New Mexico for their escape.

Right.

So they've built this jib, this jack in the box.

And so on the night of September 21st, 1985, Edward and Mary Lee Howard go have dinner at a restaurant, right?

This is right after he'd given that wonderful PowerPoint briefing.

When they leave, Howard disconnects the brake lights from the car.

So you won't be able to see when they're slowing down to have him jump out and inflate the dummy.

Mary's driving.

Now they've planned, they've drawn out a choreographed route for exactly how they're going to drive home from the restaurant.

And this is when Edward Lee Howard rolls out of the car and the dummy in the Calvin Klein field jacket pops up in the passenger seat because they think at this point that the FBI team, when they're going around this curve, won't be able to get a clean view of Edward Lee Howard rolling out of the passenger seat.

So, of course, he says, goodbye, babe.

Goodbye.

That was

wonderful line.

And then he jumps as the car turns and hits the ground running and lands hard, he says, and kind of rolls into the bushes.

This is the tragedy of this, Gordon, is that even though

even though we all know from the Snowden series, Gordon, that you love a good defector to Moscow, but I don't think even you are on team Eddie Lee Howard here, right?

He's not my kind of guy.

Neither of us want this guy to win.

But after all of this, you kind of maybe hope that it's at least going to matter.

And here's the frustrating part, right?

Is that the FBI are not even, they're nowhere to be seen that night.

They're not following him.

Because

they're not following him.

They had failed to even spot that the couple had gone out for dinner.

Okay.

Remember that the CIA, after Langley had finally come clean and said, we've got this drunken guy that we fired who's living in New Mexico and has, you know, now been outed by a defector as a spy.

After all of that, the CIA finally came clean to the FBI and told the FBI, you really should put some, you know, some of your crack Gs, put the Gs on this, your best surveillance.

Well, the FBI, there was a first office agent, so literally like his first tour, who is watching the screen in the trailer that they have parked, you know, sort of down the road from the Howard home.

And he literally has missed them leaving for dinner.

Like, he was looking down when they drove out of the driveway or something like that.

So, what that means is the whole jack-in-the-box, the goodbye, babe, the Calvin Klein jacket, all

nothing.

He didn't even know what to do.

He could have just driven away because

they totally missed it.

I know.

And it's really, from a storytelling standpoint, it kind of sucks, but it's just the reality of it is the FBI were nowhere to be seen.

So Edward Lee Howard has rolled out of the car.

Mary drives back home and confirms by phone Edward Lee Howard's appointment the next day with a psychiatrist.

They know people are listening and they want the FBI to think this guy is still here.

And presumably, if they had been following them, they would have seen the outline of the Jack in the Box thing, and then they would have heard her call and they say, okay, they're they're in the home.

All is well.

She leaves a message Howard had pre-recorded on their answering machine to do this.

Now, they're separated.

Mary and Edward Lee Howard are separated.

It's going to be 19 months before he sees them again.

Now, Howard

has recovered from his five-mile an hour roll out of the car.

He goes to his office.

And then he takes a hotel shuttle for the Albuquerque airport, which literally stops at the Hilton Hotel on the way, which is where the FBI are staying.

So he's in a van.

So he's like probably crouching down in this airport shuttle, which is idling outside as these FBI guys are hanging out in the lobby.

It's a terrible situation.

He flies to Tucson and catches a plane to St.

Louis, where apparently, at least according to his

autobiography, he's seated on the plane next to Lee Marvin, who is the kind of like hard-boiled, tough guy actor from the Dirty Dozen.

And they talk about The Hunt for Red October, which is a book that's just a small book that's just been released that year.

So he chats up with Lee Marvin.

He's having a great time, probably has a few drinks.

And then he connects St.

Louis, I think to New York, and then he's gone, leaves the States.

And

basically, by the time the Phoebes and the CIA know that he's gone, he's in Helsinki.

He's in Finland.

Now,

Howard has claimed that the first time he contacts the KGB is at the Soviet embassy in Helsinki, Finland.

Which we don't buy, do we?

No, well, I mean, it's just, there's not even a debate to be had.

Right.

I mean, it's just a total fabrication, right?

Yeah.

And so he is then smuggled across the Finnish border into Russia.

And it's kind of the mirror image of, we talked about Oleg Gordievsky earlier.

It's kind of the mirror image of Gordievsky's ex-Fil just going the other direction.

Yeah, which has happened literally a couple months earlier.

And we're going to do the Gordievsky series and the story about it later on this year because it is an amazing story and Gordievsky just died.

But that's right.

Gordieevsky goes out of the Soviet Union in the boot of a car.

And, you know, in the meantime, a few months later, Edward Lee Howard's going into the Soviet Union in a boot of the car.

And he kind of describes it in his memoir, doesn't he?

He talks about, you know, the barking dogs at the border and he's kind of prepared to be pulled out by the guards at the border.

And then eventually he climbs out when he's gone into the Soviet Union and he's welcomed into the arms of a tall elderly man with a moustache and glasses who wears a black derby hat.

I am General Vitaly Alexandrovich, he said.

I welcome you to the Soviet Union, which is a suitably dramatic way of being,

of arriving in the Soviet Union.

But by this time, the CIA and the Phoebes have realized they've got a problem, haven't they?

Yeah, and there's lots of finger-pointing, you know, of all

sorts of things.

Imagine the CIA and FBI blaming each other.

Imagine.

Imagine that.

Yes, exactly.

It's hard.

It's hard fault, is it?

You could just imagine the argument going, like, it's your fault for not telling us about him earlier and what he was like.

It's your fault for not putting a better surveillance team on it.

I mean, there's plenty of blame to go around.

Who do you blame the most, Gordon?

I mean, I guess you can track it back and you can go.

The CIA should have worked out he was a baden earlier and dealt with him.

But by the time the FBI know that he is a spy and a traitor, you'd think you'd have pretty good surveillance on him.

But I guess it's just a bit of complacency.

I blame the FBI.

Surprise.

Surprise is David.

Surprise.

Yeah.

I lay the blame.

Once an agency manual, doesn't he?

Defeat of the Phoebes.

But meanwhile, Edward Lee Howard is in Moscow.

He's going to get looked after, isn't he?

He's going to be put in a safe house, fed caviar, smoked salmon, claims he's going to meet the head of the KGB.

They'll show him pictures to identify a whole raft of other CIA officers, right?

I mean, and we should make a note here, Gordon, that in the episode or bonus episode for declassified club members that will drop on Friday, we're actually going to interview one of those CIA officers who was betrayed by Edward Lee Howard.

So we'll talk to one of those people on the other end of this man's decisions.

But

Edward Lee Howard, basically, in his revisionist history of all that happened, says, you know, I didn't give any details of assets.

You never knew them.

Claims, you know, he only gave details anyone could have gotten from a Le Carré novel, which again, I think, is also total bunk, right?

Yeah.

He's probably already at this point, in order to have earned passage into the Soviet Union, he's probably already given them the most valuable information he's got, right?

That would make sense that he would have done that in some of those meetings in Europe in the fall of 84 and early 85 before he leaves.

But again, he's going through a whole bunch of information that's actually going to be really relevant to the KGB.

I mean, it's helpful to the KGB to show him basically a book of faces of any diplomatic mission anywhere in the world where the KGB wants to know, well, who, it doesn't have to be even in Russia, although that would have been important.

They could have shown him pictures of every State Department officer that is working at the embassy in Bogota.

And he could say, well, okay, yeah, that's Jack Smith and that's Jane Doe, right?

Like, that's valuable for the Russians, right?

So he's still giving them useful information.

And now he gets a new life, I guess, in Russia, which seems to involve from his own memoir, caviar and women.

He's a sleazebag.

I mean, that's at this point in the, you know, he's not for a while.

He's Mary Behind.

You know, Mary Behind is behind.

With their young kid.

And yet, when you read his kind of memoir, it's like he keeps mentioning well i was provided an attractive blonde you know mid-20s translator called anna then another woman is provided to him clearly by the kgb to accompany him on his trips around the soviet union and clearly designed to to seduce him then another attractive woman is put in this path when he goes to ukraine there's probably information they know that he wants to withhold and they figure if he's got kind of all the typical vices, I guess, right?

So they just kind of push women and alcohol and fine food and, you know, kind of make him feel special when he sits down in front of KGB officers.

And at some point, I mean, just anything he knows of any relevance to the KGB, he shares.

Listeners should bear in mind that if they're thinking that this world of caviar and women and, you know, life in Moscow sounds good, it's not going to end well for our Eddie.

Grim, grim endings for Eddie here.

But Mary comes out, doesn't she, with the son, but she doesn't want to live there.

Maybe no great surprise.

She comes out and then she goes back to the US.

I mean, she's going to admit helping him escape, but say she never knew about the espionage.

So she's not charged for it.

But it leaves Howard even more adrift, I think you get a sense in these years.

You know, he's kind of bored.

He starts partying hard.

And also, he kind of moves around from his memoir.

He moves around the whole Soviet bloc, doesn't he?

Trying to find a place.

I mean, it's amazing where he ends up going.

He goes to kind of Prague, he looks at Cuba, Budapest.

It's that restlessness that we talked of at the start, isn't it?

He just can't settle anywhere.

No, exactly.

I mean, it's kind of the same story, just on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

I mean, a group of Americans who are visiting Moscow in 1990 saw him.

This reported seeing a drunken American in a dollar bar accompanied by a burly set of bodyguards who's making a nuisance, offering to buy them drinks and trying to chat them up about football.

Howard says, look, I love my country, but frankly, with the FBI and CIA, I'm at war.

And he'll write in that memoir that he never intended to hurt his country, but I was never responsible for the arrest or death of anyone, which is garbage.

He kind of has painted himself in his own revisionist understanding of the world as a victim, right, of these agencies, as opposed to somebody who did sort of, you know, unbelievable damage to the American espionage business.

Yeah, and the reality becomes pretty kind of sad and pathetic, doesn't it?

David Remnick, who's now the editor of The New Yorker, but was then the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, interviews him in October 1990, and he says, life imitates trash fiction.

This spy novelist certainly hopes so.

He finds Edward Lee Howard playing computer games and reading Len Dayton, good novelist, and also drunk all the time.

As the day went by, the character seemed to drain out of Howard.

He seemed to get bored with himself.

bored with his story.

I mean, I love that.

He's even bored by his own

story.

By his own life story that he's trying to project and tell.

I hope that we've told it in a better way than he did himself.

I think this is unfortunately how it ends up for all too many defectors.

You spend time talking to some of the agency officers who work with this group called the National Resettlement Operations Center, NROC, which is basically in charge of kind of helping defectors come into the states that are essentially in some form of like witness protection.

But how do you then acclimate?

How do you get jobs?

How do you learn the language?

You know, how does your family adapt?

And a lot of the stories are just really sad.

A lot of substance abuse, a lot of people who are really, really important from whence they came, but are no longer, right?

And who are totally out of the action.

And I mean, in some cases, it's like, you know, crazy stuff, like getting in drunken fights at Red Lobster and things like that.

And then you've got the agency having to come in and try to work it out with the police.

And it's, it's bad.

I mean, I think it's, it doesn't turn out well for a lot of these, a lot of these assets.

Yeah.

And so Howard is going to write a memoir and he calls it Safe House.

It's actually a pretty good name.

It's not a bad title.

Yeah.

It's not so safe though.

Right, but it is not so safe because

he implies that's where he's going to spend the rest of his life looking forward to the future, leaving the past behind.

But yes, the safe house doesn't turn out so safe.

He has a fall down the stairs and breaks his neck on July 12th, 2002.

Man, people falling in Russia left it.

People falling in Moscow.

I know, and breaking their neck.

What do we think?

You have a very suspicious air about you, Gordon.

The scare quotes you used on fall.

You think someone killed him?

No, I don't know, actually.

I mean, by 2002, he's totally useless, right?

Yeah,

I think it is entirely plausible.

Let's remember, he is drunk all the time.

Yeah.

So I think it is entirely plausible that he is so drunk, he just falls down the stairs.

So I think that is plausible.

I think so is suicide or something like that.

Yeah.

Less plausible.

I mean,

I'm slightly unconvinced the Russians would actually bump him off.

I just don't think, doesn't feel that lightly to me.

Yeah.

I guess I don't see what they have to gain by doing it, although maybe they don't have much to lose at that point either.

And maybe he's just sort of a bother.

I don't know.

And you, Gordon, have heard a theory.

Is that right?

From a former CIA officer that his death was faked.

Is that right?

Yeah.

It was just a theory that his death was fake.

So that he could then resettle in another country with a new identity.

Which leads to the tantalizing possibility, if that was true, which I'm a bit skeptical about, I'm going to be honest, that he's somewhere out there listening to our podcast.

Ooh.

He could redeem himself in his old age and become a friend of the pod.

He could become a secret squirrel.

He could come on as a guest.

He could come on.

I think that theory seems like the least plausible of all of the options, but big if true.

Yeah.

Big if true.

Big if true.

Big if true.

I mean, and we are left, I think, as we bring this sort of sordid tale of Edward Lee Howard to a close, I do think, even though this story Gordon is taking place in the mid-80s, that it still says something very true about the fact that spy services can be wrecked by one person's decisions.

The KGB only discovers Tolkachev's treason, which, by the way, I mean, Tolkachev is only found because of Howard, and Howard is only found because of Vitaly Yurchenko, Yurchenko, who defects from the KGB.

So you have these individual choices.

What's going on in the sort of the gray matter of a few people's heads is having this tremendous impact on the spy game.

And yet, you know, these are kind of enormously consequential spies and decisions.

And yet they are taken for the most kind of mundane reasons.

I mean, in so many ways, I find Edward Lee Howard such a kind of

mundane character.

You know, the way he looks,

he's enormously consequential, but you know, it's all just to do with, you know, he's a weird, restless, oddball drug user who lies in his polygraph.

But then by having been badly treated by the CIA, not badly treated, but, you know, badly handled, maybe, it just kind of unlocks this really kind of grievance-driven personality, which does such damage.

I mean, it really does show how much damage can be done for kind of quite selfish, mundane reasons, I think.

Yeah, the great dispenser of wisdom, Jerry Seinfeld, has a line in the sitcom where he says, People, they're the worst.

And I think that is the Edward Lee Howard story in a nutshell there, because you're right.

He is a kind of sleazy, sad guy who thinks that he's the man and feels that he has been done wrong by the CIA and just wants to hit back, no matter the sort of consequences, right?

So it's profoundly selfish and yet at the same time, maybe somewhat relatable to all of us at different points in our life, right?

Where it's like badly treated by the bad.

But if you've been treated badly by an organization or a person or something, I mean, you kind of want to just like hit back.

Now, it is interesting because there have been some references recently, because, of course, a lot of people have been fired from the U.S.

intelligence community under the new administration.

And I've seen some references in places where going, oh, does this create the risk of more Edward Lee Howards?

Has this put a lot of people out there from the intelligence community who know secrets and who are aggrieved?

I don't know.

What do you think?

In theory, it's created a pool of people.

But I think Howard does feel a bit different in both who he was and how he was treated to what's happened recently.

Even if you think, hey, look,

the CIA is overstaffed and it needs to be smaller.

It's just a fact that there is a risk associated with turning people out of an organization who all have really sensitive information in their heads, right?

It's just a fact.

Like you're taking that risk.

And so the larger the population of people who are turned out,

the greater the risk that you have one, Edward Lee Howard, in there, who, even if it's not true, even if they're sat down and told that their position is being cut and they're given severance and they're, you you know, they're treated respectably on the way out, given the circumstances.

Even if that were the case, it's still possible given how humans are wired that you have somebody who leaves and says, look, I'm awesome and someone has done something to me that makes me not feel awesome and I want to get back at them.

I think the fact that it does increase the risk profile, even if you think the decision is the right one.

Yeah.

So if you were the Russians and the Chinese now, you would probably be

looking at that cohort and just thinking, well, is there anyone there who's really pissed off?

Maybe who's really pissed off and has got money troubles and has got something else that we can lean on or maybe some kind of personal.

background and looking through your data sets and everything else that you've stolen about you know employees and that you can collect from social media or elsewhere put that all together and just go ah maybe this person maybe that's one we should we should try and we should probably end by saying two messages one is we are not advising anyone to do that and secondly we also tell you to drink responsibly Just before anyone thinks that

we've had to have a lot of caveats of these episodes, haven't we?

Just before anyone thinks that this entire podcast has been encouraging bad behavior, either on the personal

drug and drink routes or on approaching a foreign intelligence service, we would like to say we are not endorsing such behavior.

And remember how it ended for a poor Eddie in Moscow.

It did not end well.

So, Gordon, I think this is a good spot to close it out because this story from the 80s, I think, as we've shown here, in addition to hopefully being just fascinating at the human level and at the level of kind of Cold War tradecraft, I think does really say something about the kind of the very real spy games that are going on today when you're dealing with officers who have been turned out, or really, just frankly, the behaviors of individuals and the impact they can have on the spy business.

That's right.

And just a reminder for those who are members of the Declassified Club, we've got a great interview coming, haven't we, on friday with someone who knew edward lee howard he was he was on the you know he was there at the same time and part of that that world and who's going to be able to give us a kind of real insight to it so uh just a reminder that's for our declassified club members and you can join at the restisclassified.com

but until then we'll see you next time see you next time