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

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25:30welcome 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

25:53Gordon Corera:is escape from under that surveillance yes well and they won't they won't talk at home they being edward lee howard and mary because he figures the place is wiretapped and he's 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.

26:38Gordon Corera: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 legislator 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 of 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.

27:26Gordon Corera: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.

28:11Gordon Corera: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 D.C. 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, sir. 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, 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.

29:03Gordon Corera:and this dummy could be inflated. And they worked out 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. This is right after he'd given that wonderful PowerPoint briefing.

29:44Gordon Corera: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 the Howard rolling out of the passenger seat.

30:27So of course he says, goodbye, babe. Goodbye. That's right. Wonderful. 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.

30:42Gordon Corera:This is the tragedy of this, Gordon, is that even though we all know from the Snowden series, is 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. 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 now been outed by a defector as a spy.

31:36Gordon Corera: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 G's put the G's 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 for nothing.

32:15He didn't even need to do it. He could have just driven away.

32:18Gordon Corera: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 say, OK, they're in the home.

32:55Gordon Corera: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 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.

33:36Gordon Corera: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 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 Pheebs and the CIA know that he's gone, he's in Helsinki.

34:21He's in Finland.

34:24Gordon Corera: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? 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 Ole Gordievsky earlier. It's kind of the mirror image of Gordievsky's eggsville just going the other direction. Yeah, which has happened literally a few months earlier. And we're going to do the Gordievsky series and the story about it later on this year.

35:04Because it is an amazing story and Gordievsky just died. But that's right. Gordievsky 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 got 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.

35:38I am General Vitaly Alexandrovich, he said. I welcome you to the Soviet Union, which is a suitably dramatic way of arriving in the Soviet Union. But by this time, the CIA and the Thebes have realized they've got a problem, haven't they?

35:57Gordon Corera:Yeah, and there's lots of finger pointing, you know, of all the sort of anticipated waves. Imagine the CIA and FBI blaming each other. Blaming each other, yes. Imagine that. Yes, exactly. It's hard to picture, isn't 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 badden earlier. 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.

36:34But I guess it's just a bit of complacency. I blame the FBI. That's a surprise. Surprise, David. Surprise. Yeah. I lay the blame. Once an agency man. That's the feet of the Thebes. 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.

36:56Gordon Corera:They'll show him pictures to identify a whole raft of other CIA officers, right? 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 he only gave details anyone could have gotten from a Le Carre novel, which again, I think is also total bunk, right?

37:39Yeah.

37:39Gordon Corera: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.

38:18Gordon Corera: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, at this point in the, you know, he's gone full sleazebag. Behind, you know, 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-twenties translator called Anna.

38:59Then another woman is provided to him, clearly by the KGB, to accompany him on his trips around the Soviet Union and clearly designed to seduce him. Then another attractive woman is put in this path when he goes to Ukraine.

39:12Gordon Corera: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 find food and 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 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 with the sun but she doesn't want to live there maybe no great surprise she comes out and then she goes back to the u.s 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 but it leaves how 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.

40:11He 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.

40:27Gordon Corera: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 were visiting Moscow in 1990 saw him, reported seeing a drunken American in a dollar bar accompanied by a burly set of bodyguards. He was making a nuisance, offering to buy them drinks and trying to chat them up about football. Howard says, I love my country, but frankly, with the FBI and CIA, I'm at war. 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.

41:16Yeah. 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 a Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, interviews him in October 1990. And he says, life imitates trash fiction.

41:29Gordon Corera: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... 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.

42:18Gordon Corera: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 were 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 got the agency having to come in and try to work it out with the police. And it's bad. I mean, I think it doesn't turn out well for a lot of these assets.

42:51Gordon Corera:Yeah. And so Howard is going to write a memoir and he calls it Safe House. It's actually a pretty good name. You know, it's not a bad title. Yeah, it's not so safe, though. Yeah, but it is not so safe. Because, you know, 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 12, 2002. Man, people falling in Russia left and right. People falling in Moscow. I know, and breaking their neck. What do we think? You have a very suspicious air about you, Gordon.

43:26Gordon Corera:and those 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. plausible i mean i'm i'm slightly unconvinced the russians would actually bump him off i just don't think it doesn't feel that likely 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 yeah 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's just a theory that his death was fake so that he 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.

44:31Gordon Corera:He could redeem himself in his old age and become a friend of the pod. He could become a secret squirrel. That's right. 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, right? 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 Tolkachev is only found because of Howard and Howard is only found because of Vitaly Yurchenko who defects from the KGB so you have these individual choices what's going on in the grey matter of a few people's heads is having this tremendous impact on the spy game and yet these are kind of enormously consequential spies and decisions.

45:41And 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.

46:26Gordon Corera: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, 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.

47:12Now, it is interesting, because there have been some references recently, because of course, a lot of people have been fired from the US 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 Howard? 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.

47:46Gordon Corera: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 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.

48:38Gordon Corera: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, you know, 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, you know, 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 try.

49:17And 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 we've had to have a lot of caveats in these episodes just before anyone thinks that this this entire podcast has been encouraging bad behavior either on the uh the personal you know drug and drink or on approaching a foreign intelligence service we would like to say we are not endorsing such behavior and remember how it ended for poor eddie in Moscow. It did not end well.

49:47Gordon Corera: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.

50:27He was on the, you know, he was there at the same time and part of that world. And he's going to be able to give us a kind of real insight to it. So just a reminder, that's for our Declassified Club members. And you can join at therestisclassified.com. but until then we'll see you next time see you next time

50:51you matched on hinge you're vibing then her energy completely changes what do you do i'm raven smith and i wrote and read a real love story about this exact sitch listen to the free audiobook now this episode is brought to you by chat gpt hey it's bill simmons from the bill simmons podcast Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans.

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