Oakton, Virginia, 1000 Hours, August 2, 1985
The scene at the Oakton safe house, a modest town house on Shawn Leigh Drive, was anything but discreet. A line of government cars awkwardly disgorged a dozen passengers at the door while Medanich fumbled with the keys. I arrived just as the group was ushered inside. Yurchenko stood out among the group.
“Colonel Yurchenko, I am Thomas Fannin, representing Mr. William Casey, the Director of Central Intelligence,” I said. “He has asked that I personally convey to you his compliments, and tell you that if there is anything you need, just ask.”
Yurchenko seemed pleased that Casey had sent a personal envoy to welcome him.
“Thank you, Mr. Fountain,” he said, getting my alias wrong. “Please tell Director Casey that I have no special needs at this moment, and that your boys have taken wonderful care of me from the moment I met them in Rome. Our KGB boys would still be trying to figure out what to do with someone like me, and yours already have me in Virginia.” Yurchenko’s English was heavily accented, and he was clearly running on adrenaline, but he struck me as genuinely grateful for the treatment he had received so far.
“Colonel, Mr. Casey asked me to assure you that he is available at any time if you have information that you would prefer to share only with him. Do you have any such information?”
Yurchenko shook his head, while pointing to Ames. “I have already told that one, that colleague, that I have no such information. But I have much, very much, to tell you and the boys.”
Before I could respond, Ames was at my side, having seen Yurchenko point in his direction. “Need any help, Tom?” he asked, using my alias.
“No. No help needed.” I looked at Ames, whom I had just met for the first time the previous afternoon, and thought, I don’t even know what alias this guy’s using. Maybe we ought to try to get this thing a little more organized.
McLean, Virginia, 0900 Hours, August 3, 1985
Burton Gerber pulled his gray Toyota into the slot next to my car in the parking lot of Charley’s, a popular happy hour meeting spot off Virginia’s Route 123, a short drive from CIA headquarters. Both of us were a few minutes early for a hastily called Saturday morning meeting with the FBI. It was the second day after Yurchenko’s defection. Gerber got into my car to wait for the FBI.
“You said you knew Jim Geer,” Gerber said, directing the air-conditioning vent away from himself. Geer, the newly appointed chief of the FBI’s intelligence division, was one of the men we’d come to meet. He had just wound up his duties as director of the FBI laboratory and hadn’t yet reported for his first day on the new job—that would take place on Monday. Geer’s predecessor, Ed O’Malley, had retired the day before, and the whole affair—the Yurchenko defection and the Mr. Robert investigation—was suddenly in Geer’s lap.
“Yeah, he was ASAC in Dallas when I was down there about five years ago. He’s a big, easygoing guy. Tennessee. Smart, professional. Didn’t seem too caught up in the turf battles. At least not back then.” I motioned to the envelope in Gerber’s hand. “That it?” He nodded. “Does the bureau know anything about him?”
“OS sent a memo over to the bureau yesterday, but they didn’t identify Howard as Mr. Robert.”
Gerber had, in fact, been frustrated the day before when the CIA’s Office of Security officials had hedged on the message they sent to the FBI concerning Yurchenko’s revelation about a Mr. Robert. Gerber had said he was convinced that Yurchenko was referring to Edward Lee Howard; he was the only person who could possibly fit the description offered by the Soviet defector. Gerber had lived with the Howard case ever since he took over SE Division a year earlier, and he knew far too much about Edward Lee Howard’s messy divorce from the CIA to think that it could be anyone else. But the Office of Security had not told the FBI of the almost certain match between Howard and “Mr. Robert,” costing the bureau a day in their investigation. Gerber had decided to bring the bureau into the loop on Saturday morning, two days after Yurchenko walked into the U.S. embassy in Rome. And that’s why we were here in Charley’s parking lot.
When he first applied to become a CIA case officer in 1980, Ed Howard had seemed like an ideal candidate, with an interesting mix of government and private-sector experiences in Latin America. An Air Force brat, he had served in the Peace Corps and the U.S. Agency for International Development in Latin America and later held a management job at a company in Chicago before his natural restlessness led him to think about working for the CIA. It was the mystique of the agency, the notion of a secret life on the edge, that had attracted him.
Howard easily admitted to past drug and alcohol use while undergoing the required polygraph test for new applicants. The CIA’s standards had recently been relaxed—the Office of Security had been forced by the realities of the 1970s to be more flexible in approving new employees who acknowledged past casual drug use, so Howard passed through the first screens of the system. Questions would later be raised, however, about whether Howard’s drug use—even the incidents he acknowledged on his polygraph—should ever have been defined as casual.
After operational training at the Farm, Howard was chosen, in early 1982, for assignment to Moscow. His wife, Mary, whom he had met in Colombia while they were both in the Peace Corps in the early 1970s, would also be trained by the CIA so she could help him in his Moscow operations. David Forden, chief of the SE Division at the time, was told by the division’s security officer that Howard had a past record of drug use, but Forden was assured that it was not significant enough to prevent Howard from being offered a sensitive post. At the time, CIA rules prohibited a division chief from examining an employee’s security and medical records himself, so Forden had to rely on the security and medical staff to tell him what was in the files.
After language school and training in Jack Platt’s Internal Operations course, Howard was assigned as a deep cover officer in Moscow. He would be given a “clean slot”—an obscure job in the embassy that had never before been used as cover by the CIA. The clean slot postings were given only to young case officers like Howard who had never served overseas before and thus would never have been identified by the KGB as agency officers.
With a well-planned and low-key arrival on the Moscow scene, KGB surveillance would pay cursory attention to clean slot officers like Howard, while concentrating on already identified American intelligence officers assigned to known cover slots. The agency had started placing deep cover officers in clean slot jobs while Gerber was Moscow chief in the early 1980s; one of Gerber’s first clean slot officers had been Dennis McMahon, a first-tour officer who had successfully handled Adolf Tolkachev. Now that Gerber was division chief, he was strongly committed to the practice of relying heavily on clean slot officers—even if they were untested rookies, like Howard.
While studying the Russian language in preparation for his Moscow assignment, Howard shared an office with Michael Sellers, another Moscow-bound case officer. During their year or so in the pipeline, Howard and Sellers spent one day a week and weekends “reading in” on the CIA’s Moscow operations. While most of the case files revealed only the cryptonyms of the Soviets working for the CIA in Moscow, Howard could have gained access to files with their true names. The Tolkachev file was enormous, enough to fill several cabinet drawers, and even if Howard did not know SPHERE’s true name, there was more than enough operational detail for the KGB to pinpoint Tolkachev, including his address.
In April 1983, just before his final clearance for assignment to Moscow, Howard was asked to take another polygraph test, a standard requirement for officers about to be assigned to a sensitive area. This time, the polygraph told a different story. Howard’s personal failings weren’t passed over. There was evidence of ongoing drug and alcohol use and an instance of petty theft—Howard acknowledged that he had stolen cash from the purse of a woman on an airplane. Under questioning on one of the polygraphs, he also revealed that he had cheated during a training exercise designed to test his abi
lity to work on GTTAW, the Moscow cable-tapping operation. During the exercise at the Farm, Howard was supposed to carry a weighted backpack while climbing into a manhole, a mock-up of the TAW site. Instead, he had stuffed his backpack with cardboard to make it easier to get into the hole. Howard failed the polygraph, and a second, a third, and a fourth, before the CIA’s Office of Security recommended a personnel evaluation board be convened to review his suitability for employment. After an extensive review by the panel of senior CIA officials, including Forden, Howard was fired in early May 1983.
On the day he was told to leave the CIA, electronic entry and exit records would later show that he had gone in and out of the building several times in quick succession before turning in his CIA badge for the last time. Howard left the CIA with nothing to show for his time except bitterness, a knowledge of Russian, and a head full of some of the agency’s most closely guarded secrets.
Suddenly out on the street, with a wife and a new baby to support, Howard was stunned and humiliated. It didn’t take long for him to start drinking again. He moved back to New Mexico, where he had been born, and took a job with the state legislature as an economic analyst. But he never stopped seething about the treatment he had received from the CIA.
The first signs of trouble came quickly after his firing. Howard began to make bizarre late-night telephone calls from his home to the special Washington tie-line to the U.S. embassy in Moscow, in one instance leaving a message with the Marine guard for Moscow station chief Carl Gephardt, telling him that he wouldn’t be showing up for his physical.
His telephone calls to Moscow were reported back to CIA headquarters, and they began to trouble Forden. He went to the Office of Security to see if the agency could monitor Howard’s telephone. In the spring of 1984, after he was told that the CIA didn’t have the legal power to tap Howard’s phone, Forden went to David Blee, then the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, to tell him about the phone calls to Moscow and to warn him that Howard might be a security risk. Forden later recalled bitterly that Blee had simply smiled and done nothing.
Back in Santa Fe, Howard’s mood was darkening. His drinking was getting steadily worse. In February 1984, he was arrested for assault after he fired a gun during a street fight with some local kids he followed from a bar in Santa Fe. Only his white-collar background and his job at the state legislature saved him from jail.
In May 1984, Howard showed up one night on the Washington doorstep of Tom Mills, one of his former supervisors in the SE Division. Howard had been drinking heavily, and he complained to Mills that he had been “fucked” by the agency. Troubled by the episode, Burton Gerber, who was just taking over SE Division from Forden, sent a psychologist with Mills to New Mexico to talk with Howard and gauge his mental condition.
Howard admitted to them that on his trip back to Washington, he had loitered outside the Soviet consulate, debating whether to walk in to the KGB. He had gone to the consulate, rather than the embassy, because he knew from his CIA training that the FBI didn’t monitor the consular affairs section as carefully, he told them. He insisted that he hadn’t actually gone inside; he said he had resisted the temptation once he thought about what becoming a spy for the Soviet Union would do to his son, Lee.
The psychologist brought another bit of news that Gerber found equally unsettling—Howard no longer seemed such a mess. He seemed in control of himself and in much better shape. It was as if he had made an important decision to change his life.
Gerber passed along the news to the CIA’s security office and arranged for the agency to pay for psychological treatment for Howard. But the CIA had still not warned the FBI that Edward Howard now might be a threat to national security. Later, FBI officials would tell Gerber that they wouldn’t have been able to take action against Howard at that time, since there was no proof that he had committed espionage. But Gerber and other CIA officials still paid dearly later for their failure to notify the FBI.
Even though there still wasn’t enough evidence yet to prove conclusively that Howard had become a spy, it was long past time to break the news to the FBI. With Yurchenko’s warning, everyone who had been involved with the Howard case began to realize just what a mistake it had been to throw him out onto the street.
Gerber looked out his window just as two FBI sedans pulled in beside him. “Here they are,” he said flatly.
Afterward, the FBI would omit any mention of this Saturday meeting when it gave its account of the Howard case. Instead, FBI officials would insist that the CIA waited much longer to inform them that they knew Howard was the spy Yurchenko had described.
But in fact, Gerber also warned the FBI about one of Howard’s hidden skills. The fired CIA officer had taken the CIA’s most advanced training—Jack Platt’s Internal Operations course—so Gerber wanted the bureau to be aware of Howard’s ability to evade surveillance.
Oakton, Virginia, 1030 Hours, August 3, 1985
The air in the Oakton town house was blue from cigarette smoke when Chuck Medanich arrived the morning after Yurchenko’s arrival on U.S. soil. Up the short staircase from the foyer, Yurchenko was sitting at the dining room table peering over a list of names with FBI agents Michael Rochford and Reid Broce.
Yurchenko stood up when Medanich walked in. He’s restless, Medanich thought. Nervous energy.
“Good morning, Alex.” Medanich used the operational alias Yurchenko had chosen until his new identity was developed.
“I have no need of sleep,” Yurchenko said excitedly. “Too much work to do. Each time I close my eyes I stand again up in bed and think of one more thing to tell the boys. I now must sleep always with a pen and paper. Sometimes things I have not remembered for years just pop into my head and I have to write them down before they leave again.”
Medanich turned to the FBI agents. “You guys want to take a break? I’d like a couple of minutes alone with Alex.”
Medanich led Yurchenko into the small kitchen off the dining room. “Can I get you anything to drink, Alex? How about a Coke?”
The tall KGB colonel took a half-full two-liter bottle of Coke from the countertop and began to pour a glass. “Ice?” Medanich asked.
“No ice. Americans like everything with ice. It makes them sick. Never should use ice!”
“Alex,” Medanich said, “I’m going to be with you almost constantly in these early weeks and months of settling in. You’re a man who has much of great value to give our side, but I want you to know that my job is to see to it that your needs are understood. I want you to know that you can turn to me anytime something is bothering you, or even when nothing is bothering you. And if you ever have anything you want to discuss with someone other than the colleagues here, anything that you want to bring directly to the attention of Mr. Casey, just tell me. Mr. Casey is deeply interested in your welfare, and he wants you to know that.”
Yurchenko nodded in understanding. “These boys are fine, and I have much to tell them. But I have been here more than one day already, and I thought I would by this time hear from Mr. Casey. . . .” He let his sentence trail off without transforming his statement into a request.
Medanich put his hand reassuringly on the defector’s shoulder. “Mr. Casey sent me here this morning to tell you personally that he is briefing the President on the courageous decision you have made,” he said, “and he will call you personally to welcome you to the United States on Monday.”
“He should tell President Reagan that I have come to him to help him in the struggle,” Yurchenko replied, perking up.
“That’s precisely what he is telling the President.” So that’s where the agitation is coming from, Medanich thought. His sense of self-importance. “Is there anything I can do to help you in these first few days? Do you need rest, some time to gather your thoughts?”
Yurchenko shook his head vigorously. “I need no rest. I have had a lifetime to gather my thoughts for this. And I must work fast because my own time may not be long.”
Medanich dec
ided to let Yurchenko’s statement pass, at least for the moment. He would bore in on that one later. There were too many people involved in this operation, he thought. The FBI and CIA were crawling all over the place. Word of Yurchenko’s arrival had spread rapidly through the intelligence world, and Medanich worried that everyone would want to be a part of the espionage freak show in Oakton.
Yurchenko had been brought to this town house in a congested suburb only because the agency’s stock of available safe houses had been so low at the time. But it was clear the CIA needed to find a better place to stash its defectors outside of the twenty-five-mile zone around Washington, D.C., in which Soviet diplomats were allowed to travel. Taking in the scene at the town house, Medanich grimaced and thought to himself that this resettlement, one of the biggest in CIA history, was being conducted with all the subtlety of a goat-fuck.
Over the next few days, as Medanich had feared, the safe house became a tourist stop for intelligence officers. What was worse, the debriefings were badly organized; too many different agencies were clamoring to grill Yurchenko on their pet issues.
At first, Yurchenko didn’t seem to mind, since he had so much he wanted to get off his chest. He was so eager to talk that one day he pulled out a large sheaf of paper and spread it across the kitchen table so he could diagram the KGB’s organization. But even as he and Medanich were hunched happily over the table, an FBI official who was not involved in the case arrived unannounced and invited Yurchenko to dinner. Yurchenko turned to Medanich and asked, “Do I have to go with him?” Medanich, furious at the interloper, said no. Yurchenko declined the dinner invitation and quickly returned to his organizational chart. Medanich had a feeling Yurchenko wouldn’t remain so tolerant if this kind of chaos wasn’t brought under control soon.
The Main Enemy Page 10