66. The Great Betrayal: An American Traitor (Ep 1)

20:39Gordon Corera:Yeah, no, so he's going to have to go through a polygraph, a background investigation, medical investigation, and a psych exam. In addition to all of the other normal things you do when you interview, like you go and sit and have a conversation with recruiters and things like that. And we should explain the polygraph, you know, often known as the lie detector. We read from that at the opening with the hammer, polygraphing him. He was still around when I went through, Gordon. I think we still had the hammer. Well, I was going to ask, did you get polygraphed on entry? Sure. Yeah. So go on, tell us about it.

21:14I've always wondered what it's like to be polygraphed.

21:15Gordon Corera:It is interesting, isn't it? Because SIS, they don't polygraph. No, MI6 don't really, they don't rely on it. I think they've done it occasionally, but they don't rely on it. I think that's the difference. It's not part of normal procedure that you would rely on in the same way as the Americans, American faith in technology, including the polygraph. But surely you can just beat it. In my imagination, you can beat it by clenching your buttocks or something as you do the test. Or just thinking about very calm thoughts when you're being asked the control question. Because then you get asked control questions where you're telling the truth, and then they'll ask you something more sensitive.

21:51And it's trying to see if there's a change in your, I don't know, your body's behavior to do with it. Surely you could just, you can game it, can't you? Isn't that what you did to get through? Yeah, exactly.

21:59Gordon Corera:How else would I have gotten through? How else would you have got through? I think it's best to see it as a tool for intimidation, not for truth discovery or said differently or maybe a bit more precisely. It's a way to kind of shake things loose and see what comes out. I mean, the way it worked for me is I took my first polygraph when I was, I think I was 19, Gordon, because I was an intern. They bring you to the DC area, typically. I mean, as an analyst, you'd come in and, you know, you do interviews at Langley or whatever. And then you go into a room and it's very, you know, it's very sterile.

22:37Gordon Corera:You do have the stupid two-way mirror, which is hilarious, right? I mean, that's there. There's like a desk, which clearly no one actually sits at regularly, but still has weird stuff on it. Like I remember there was like a bowl of candy that looked kind of dusty and there was a map of Ohio up on the wall, you know, county level map. And I remember asking the polygrapher at one point, because my dad's whole side of the family comes from Ohio and my wife's family is from Ohio. You know, if he's from Ohio and he kind of looks at me like he didn't even know that the map was there. Like, what kind of question is this, right?

23:06Gordon Corera:He had no clue. So you're in this really sterile environment and they set you down and they kind of just start with a conversation, which begins kind of friendly-like. This was my experience. It can all be, I think, a little bit different. And I would also say that the kind of people who are wanting to do polygraphy work, I would actually love if anyone would reach out to us because I cannot imagine wanting to do this kind of work. But you're basically sitting there in this kind of pretty small room, eye level with each other, and they'll start to just kind of ask basic questions. They'll do that little control thing you mentioned where they'll hook you up and you've got blood pressure cuff.

23:45Gordon Corera:you've got like a band around your chest to measure your rate of breathing and then you've got a few things they'll slip over your fingers to measure basically your galvanic response right so the sweating and things like that that are coming off of your fingertips and essentially the idea is you're monitoring stress levels right and the idea would be that if i'm if i'm lying those stress levels are higher or sort of abnormal relative to whatever baseline they set early in the interview. And the actual polygraph itself is only like six or eight questions. It's all yes or no. But a lot of the intimidation is the conversation with the polygrapher about whether you're going to say yes or no.

24:34Gordon Corera:So in my case, there's, I believe, a question about about crime right because the questions are pretty standard right i mean it's like are you working for a foreign intelligence service right things like that the thing about crime he's like well okay if i ask you this question what are you thinking about and i start you know i'm listing off all the kind of pranks you pulled in college and things that had like led to what i would describe as sort of light crime but weren't actually serious you know be careful we are on the podcast, by the way. So if you confess to something, people are listening, by the way.

25:07Maybe Callum can bleep that out.

25:08Gordon Corera:Can he bleep out my youthful indiscretions? And they're kind of saying like, the polygrapher saying, well, no, no, no, that doesn't count or I don't care about that. Because there is obviously a bar. If I'm like, hey, I burned down some houses when I was 16, that would be up there. But if it's like, oh, you broke some windows on accident and you threw a shopping cart off of a roof and you raised a pirate flag up over the college campus, like that kind of stuff is not going to they don't care right about but you did all of those things just to confirm well now i'm now i feel like i shouldn't respond yeah yeah i did all those things yeah yeah i want to hear more about that that's yeah you know youthful fun gordon you know they don't care about that but then they hook you up to the machine and he's like okay great you can answer no when i ask you this question hook you up to the machine i answer no and then he says you're lying.

26:02Gordon Corera:You're hiding something. And then you start to think, well, did I forget something? So they push that way and it goes on like that for hours. So it's not a pleasant, it's not a pleasant experience. And to bring it back to Eddie Lee Howard, he's going to go through this and obviously they're going to ask about the drugs. Now, when I was going through it, there's sort of a five-year statute of limitations on, So if you had smoked pot when you were 21 and then you're applying at 28 or 29, you're fine. But in the 70s and 80s, Gordon, the agency is having to deal with the fact that basically everybody, everybody who's applying has had some experience with drugs that are technically federally illegal.

26:50Gordon Corera:So Howard basically says, look, you know, I use drugs, but I don't have any problem. It's all youthful indiscretion, much like my property crime. And it's not a big deal. And it seems to have worked because Edward Lee Howard is going to get an offer to join the Central Intelligence Agency. So there with this kind of druggy, hippie, lefty, now inside Langley itself. Let's take a break. And then when we come back, we'll look and see how it all comes crashing down for Edward Lee Howard and ultimately for the CIA as well. Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goalhangers. The rest is football. This episode is brought to you by WISE.

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29:44Okay, welcome back. we are looking at the story of Edward Lee Howard, this drug-fueled lefty who has joined. Well, maybe he wasn't a lefty, but a drug-fueled... Now I like it. Let's stick with that. Yeah, let's keep with that. And bizarrely, by January 1981, he has been taken on as an officer for the CIA. They'll take anybody, David. Slim pickings.

30:07Gordon Corera:Slim pickings in the late 70s for recruiting. Now, so Howard joins in early 81, and Mary, his wife, is also hired later that year. She's a secretary initially, but then she becomes a support assistant for some operational work, so they can actually work together as a team. Which is quite common, isn't it? Well, not common, but it happens occasionally, because you can deploy them to places and they can work together. Real advantages to it, yeah, for sure. So Howard is picked initially for a desk job working on East Germany. But then in another, what seems, I guess, in retrospect to be a wild lapse in judgment on the part of the CIA's human resources mavens, he is slotted to go to Moscow.

30:54Which is the pinnacle of spy world. That's the biggest deal you can get, isn't it?

30:59Gordon Corera:That is the big leagues in the 80s. And we'll see in a moment why it actually makes some sense that he has chosen for the Moscow slot. But he also, in his first year, will go to the farm to complete what's now known as FTC, the Field Tradecraft course. And we should explain the farm, for those who don't know, the farm is spy school. It's where the CIA officers get trained. It's a remote location somewhere in Virginia, isn't it? Which I guess you've been there? You must have done. I can't say. Are you allowed to talk about it? No, they don't let the analysts in. We're just banging on the gates, you know?

31:35Gordon Corera:with our pots and pans. It's a military base in the Virginia Tidewater. I think the best way to think about it is that it's basically a summer camp. That's the mental model I would have. It's a big facility, right? So there's homes on the base and there's a lot of buildings, no one locks cars, no one locks their houses, there are bikes everywhere. There's classrooms, There's a bar, which is called the SRB. I think it stands for the Student Recreation Building. Instructors actually live on homes on the river. They'll own boats. There's lots of deer everywhere. In the 80s, there would have been a remarkable amount of sex and drinking in this environment.

32:20Gordon Corera:And one of my good friends who went through the farm not so long after Edward Lee Howard said, the farm smells like freshman year, Gordon. And Howard in this environment, which probably would have played to a lot of his appetites, would have done courses in agent handling and recruitment, surveillance detection routes. How do you actually communicate clandestinely or covertly with assets? He said that breaking and entering was one of his favorite courses. I think he does have, I think, a criminal undercurrent to him throughout much of his life. Disguises, how do you handle an interrogation? They were done paramilitary stuff back then, so jumping from planes, basic hand-to-hand combat, weapons trading, wilderness survival.

33:05Gordon Corera:Seems like Howard maybe didn't take some of that stuff. So point being is that even though this guy is kind of a dope, I think, Gordon, it's fair to say, he's going through a training course that is going to give him a very unique set of skills, which will all be very important later in the story to come. So he graduates from FTC. He is slotted for Moscow. And he's going to take over what was then called a clean slot, which will be an obscure job in the embassy that has never before been used as cover by a CIA officer. And we'll again hearken back to that crossing the Iron Curtain series we did on Adolf Tolkachev, where we go into a lot of the detail on the tradecraft and kind of the logic for these positions.

33:54Gordon Corera:Because basically, the idea here is the CIA wants someone like Howard, who doesn't have three or four agency tours under their belt. they want to send those kind of newer, fresher people to Moscow. The idea here being the Russians are much less likely to know or to suspect that they are CIA officers. You've got a much better chance of being able to do something like meeting an agent or clearing a drop because you're not known in any way to them. And it is one of the fascinating things, isn't it? That actually young new recruits actually get given some of the most sensitive missions in MI6 or CIA, because they are the ones least likely to be known to the other side.

34:35So often someone in their 20s can be doing something which you'd expect to be given to someone who's got loads of experience. But actually, for reasons of cover, it's more useful to use these kind of clean-skinned officers.

34:45Gordon Corera:Yeah, exactly. And in that series on Tolkachev, we talk about how the officers, the CIA officers handling Tolkachev, initially they had started with, you know, very seasoned kind of Russia-focused officers. And over time, I think as the KGB is kind of figuring this out and the tradecraft is getting tighter and tighter on both sides, the CIA is transitioning in this period to these kind of more rookie, untested officers with very clean cover. Now, he and Mary will train as a team. So when you go to Moscow or if you're slotted for Moscow, you're going to get an additional kind of battery of training courses that'll go beyond that just standard FTC, the field tradecraft course.

35:30Gordon Corera:Right. So at the time, I think I have the acronym right, but it was something called the Denied Areas Operations Course, right? So basically, additional tradecraft training given to officers who are going to places inside kind of the Soviet empire. That phrase, denied area, indicates somewhere where you can't operate in a normal way, you know, because the enemies or your adversaries' counter surveillance and surveillance capabilities will be so good that you have to have kind of special training. And that's what he's going to get. That's right. So he and Mary will train as a team in that denied areas operations course.

36:06Gordon Corera:They'll be running surveillance detection and counter surveillance drills against the FBI in Northern Virginia. And also important, a little marker here for what's to come, he's going to be training against some of the best trained FBI surveillance and counter surveillance teams, period, right? So he actually is going to get really, really good at detecting and potentially evading surveillance. He's going to receive the best possible training the U.S. government can provide in those skills before he goes to Moscow. Which might come in useful later. Which might be useful later on in this story.

36:49Gordon Corera:We don't know. We're just speculating. Just speculating. Now, before he goes to Moscow, they run another round of evaluation to see if he can handle the psychological pressure, right? Because Moscow in this time period, it's like you're basically going to expect that the KGB will have your apartment wired up for sound, that you will have a surveillance team, a KGB surveillance team that is basically dedicated to you and is following you constantly. There is no privacy. There's tons of pressure. And obviously, a lot of people might not do well in that kind of environment. Yeah. So he goes and he's basically sitting with agency psychologists.

37:33Gordon Corera:Right. And again, the drinking and the drug use from his past or maybe from his present come up. So Howard, it seems in this period, has actually visited one of the agency's alcohol counselors to talk about his behaviors. And I think it is worth a little bit, Gordon, stepping back just to talk about the intersection of booze and the Central Intelligence Agency, because in this period, I think the agency is a pretty boozy place. Yeah, this has been a running theme through our podcast from the very earliest episodes, I think, is the extent to which... Oh, right. Yeah, because in the Ron 53 ones, yeah, they were pretty boozy.

38:12Gordon Corera:Kermit Roosevelt was basically wasted while he was plotting the coup. And things have not changed by the early 80s, it sounds, by Edward Lee Howard's day. No, and it's great because the alcohol counselor basically says, look, you don't have much of an issue. And, you know, you don't have a problem. And I think, you know, it is worth maybe some debate. Like, does he actually have a problem or is it just sort of embedded in his life? And is there a distinction between those things? But the alcohol counselor, there's this great quote where he tells Howard, look, you don't have a problem. I've got people who sit in the parking lot at headquarters drinking.

38:46Gordon Corera:I've got one lady who filled her windshield wiper dispenser with vodka and rigged the line so the hose comes in the car. When she's caught in traffic, she can turn on the wipers and squirt herself. Right? I mean, so this is the bar. He's like, you don't have a problem because you haven't rigged up your car so you can drink through your windshield wipers. When you're in traffic. That's right. And, you know, booze is everywhere, right? There's booze on the desks. There's a division chief at the time who keeps a bottle of Kognak in a safe. I mean, that's not uncommon at all. It's literally everywhere.

39:19Gordon Corera:And of course, it's wonderful because it's mixed with the agency, of course, you know, keeping really important secrets. So these two things are sort of, they're blended together in this time period. Now, Howard has to be prepared to handle agents in Moscow. That means he's getting read in, probably not on names, but he's certainly getting a lot of information on these cases. He's getting information on technical operations in Moscow, which need to be serviced regularly. Bugging, wiretapping. There's a big case that he reads up on with the kryptonim GT Sphere, which is Tolkachev. Again, I don't think Howard knows Tolkachev's name, but he knows a lot about him, right?

40:05Gordon Corera:Probably knows like his address, probably knows the sort of person he is, what kind of job he has, right? So enough where it'd be very damaging if Howard were to give that to the Russians. And the couple, he and Mary, and he goes through all of this, they get scheduled to go to Moscow in June of 83. Now, they've just had a son who's been born in the spring of 83. I know, Gordon, you don't like me talking about family life and personal life, but I just worked that in there. And all is looking good for the Howard family. But then he is told that he needs to take a pre-departure polygraph. The situation for this is he gets sat in front of the hammer.

40:46Gordon Corera:You read this to start this episode. Now, Howard, it seems, isn't expecting this and isn't prepared for it. I do wonder where it comes from, because it seems like there must have been some sense that Howard was showing poor judgment. There's something wrong. Because he makes it sound like it comes out the blue, doesn't it? And that there's no reason for it. But actually, I mean, what's amazing is there's the hammer, but it's four sessions he gets in about a month or so. Yeah, which is a lot. That's not normal. That means you're failing them over and over again. In one of these, Gordon, he admits to stealing$40 from a woman's purse on an airplane.

41:28So he's coming clean about weird behavior like that. But it's a weird story as well, because the reason was, he says, her baby, the woman's baby on the airplane, was noisy and stopped him sleeping. So when she goes to the bathroom, he gets back at her by stealing$40 from her purse. Now, that, I mean, is that is weird. I mean, we've all got annoyed at babies on airplanes, but we don't kind of then go and steal from the person. I mean, you've never stolen from someone on an airplane who's bothered you, Gordon? No, I have not. Okay. This is clearly a professional episode for David McCloskey here.

42:05Gordon Corera:That is a very weird behavior. It's a very weird behavior. And I think it does hint at something that the CIA leadership who sort of put him back under the light here for these polygraphs must have wondered about. Because obviously there's some petty thievery in the story, but it shows a startling, startling lack of judgment on his part, doesn't it? And a kind of unconstrained criminality that the agency frowns upon. He also admits to cheating during a training exercise, also frowned upon. So one of Edward Lee Howard's tasks in Moscow is going to be to service a tap that the CIA maintains on senior Soviet leadership communications, very sensitive program, and very technically complicated.

42:55Gordon Corera:And one of the kind of human elements of it, though, is that somebody, a Moscow station officer, has to go into a manhole wearing a heavy backpack that has essentially the tapes that they can change out on this tap. And in order to do that, you've got to be able to go down into a manhole with the required weight service that didn't come back out. And Howard apparently during the test run had filled his backpack with cardboard instead of the weight. So you get again, you get this indication of like, he's just kind of cheating. It's definitely wrong. It's not like crazy wrong. He's kind of just a cheater.

43:34I love this fact CIA officials have also claimed that Howard admitted to breaking into vending machines at CIA headquarters. I mean, like, again, you've got to be pretty kind of weird to think, I'm going to steal from a vending machine. Broke into the hot dog vending machines. Yeah, I mean, is it really worth it for the sake of a free hot dog to risk your career? I mean, going back to your point, the polygraph is a kind of intimidation device. He's clearly, it seems like, suddenly admitting all kinds of stuff. He's kicked some stuff loose. Yeah, it's just, oh, you know, and these four polygraphs, all of it's suddenly coming out because he's realising he's under that kind of pressure from it, from the continuous polygraphing.

44:12So, you know, there's all the drugs and alcohols as well. So it's clearly something is flagging up as a problem at this point.

44:19Gordon Corera:Well, and the polygraphs pick up the drug and alcohol use. And the polygrapher seems to think that Howard is probably right, that Howard's been using drugs while employed by the CIA, which is a major no-no. And that would mean that he's no longer suitable for Moscow or, frankly, to even continue to work at the CIA. So Howard says that he is called in. He's fired. He's dismissed immediately. Now, I find this part of his memory bizarre. But he says he had to turn in the keys to his car and he's escorted to the exit. And then he had to take the bus home. So his car is confiscated. It's a weird story.

45:06Gordon Corera:Like a company car? There's no company. He's not driving a company car in the early 80s. But it would make sense that he's dismissed immediately and that his badge is taken. And they basically just, you know, you get your box of stuff and leave the building and security takes you out, right? So you're not taking anything else with you. It is extremely uncommon to fire people from the Central Intelligence Agency. We could debate whether Howard should have just been pulled from Moscow and put on a desk job somewhere versus actually letting him go. But it does show the gravity of the situation. And I think how the agency had completely lost trust in him, which once that is done, you're done.

45:50Yeah, because normally, I guess, if you screw up what you're relegated somewhere, because I go back to thinking about Mitrokin, who we obviously did in a previous episode. When he kind of screws up or things don't go well from abroad, he's relegated to the archives. You know, he's put into being an archivist. So there are jobs which people can be put into if you're not going to go to Moscow. But instead, in this case, I guess maybe the extent of the personality issues and something, but the deception maybe in the fact that he'd lied, you know, in the previous polygraphs and misled them. All of that makes them just go, nope, we're not even going to give you a side job.

46:27you're out.

46:29Gordon Corera:There is something, I mean, it's not formally called this, but everybody calls it this. It's the penalty box. And the idea is if you screw up, typically you get sent to some kind of unimportant, might not be the archives, but you get sent to some unimportant desk job, typically at Langley. And you get kind of supervised for a couple of years to see, do you play by the rules? Do you not do anything insane? Can you handle it? Do you do your time? OK, and then after that, you get another opportunity. If you've sort of done your penance, you get another opportunity to go out and do something in the field.

47:06Gordon Corera:All right. It's the penalty box. But because of the deception, they can't trust him. And so he is he's out. And I think what's what's really interesting here, though, Gordon, is he's not committed espionage yet. Right. I mean, up to this point, this is like a sad story of a guy who just couldn't quite hold it together inside the CIA and gets run out on the cusp of what could have been this life changing tour in Moscow. It's a tragic story to some degree, but he's not a criminal. Well, I guess despite the maybe stealing from the woman on the plane and the vending machine crimes, he's not a serious criminal and he's not a traitor yet.

47:44But what he is, is angry. I mean, what he is, he's angry, frustrated, feels like he's been denied, he's been screwed over. He's kind of fuming, consumed by this kind of bitterness. So I think there with Edward Lee Howard fired dramatically from the CIA, even his car keys taken away from him, he claims. Let's stop. And when we come back for the next and final episode of this story, We'll see how that hatred of the CIA, which has come from this experience, compels him to take the fateful step really of contacting who else? The Russians.

48:21Gordon Corera:And of course, Gordon, if listeners do not want to wait to find out how Edward Lee Howard takes that fateful step, they don't have to. You can go and join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. Get early access to episodes, bonus episodes, Gordon Carrera's home address, everything you could possibly want. But if not, we won't hold it against you and the episode will be out. as usual, later this week. So we'll see you next time. See you next time.

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