“It was the casuals,” he repeated. “They spotted him wandering around in the field.” The warning from PIMENTA was the first hard evidence of an agent actually being arrested since Tolkachev.
I glanced over at Redmond, whose demeanor offered no clues as to what he was making of all of this. After the meeting broke up, I took Redmond into my office.
“What do you think?”
“Three possibilities. One, the casuals did their socialist duty and snitched on our guy, and the KGB eventually found the rock and staked it out. Two, they weren’t casuals at all, but KGB surveillance, and they found the rock and staked it out. Three, we’ve got a bigger problem. Take your choice.” Redmond’s manner telegraphed his growing conviction that there was a cancer at the heart of the CIA.
“What’s your choice?” I asked, already sensing his answer.
“Three. We’ve got a problem.”
“Tell me why.”
“Too many fucking problems all at once. It never happens this way. We lose operations, but not like this. TAW goes dead. Bokhan gets an elaborate but phony recall. Stombaugh gets busted with VANQUISH. MILLION gets called home early from Lisbon, and now WEIGH gets rolled up in Moscow. Add to that the fact that the British ran Gordievsky for years without any problem, we figure it out in March, and then he gets called back to Moscow. The KGB’s got too much good luck all of a sudden. Life doesn’t work that way. You tell me if we’ve got a fucking problem.”
12
Washington, D.C., September 18, 1985
The decision was finally reached at FBI headquarters on Wednesday, September 18, to close in on Edward Howard the next day. Over the previous three weeks, the FBI had maintained discreet surveillance and had tapped his home telephone. They had established a post near Howard’s house, where one agent could keep watch and alert other agents whenever Howard left home.
Jack Platt, Howard’s old instructor in the Internal Operations course, was worried. No one had officially told him that Howard was under investigation, but the signs were all around him. Security officers had come to ask him if he could list all of the trainees who had taken the IO course, been slated for Moscow, and later been fired. Platt said there was only one—Edward Howard. He figured out that Howard was the target of the spy probe launched after Yurchenko’s defection and went to see Burton Gerber.
Platt told Gerber he wanted to warn the FBI about Howard’s countersurveillance training, so the bureau would send its best watchers—nicknamed “the Gs”—out to Santa Fe. The Gs were the only FBI surveillance agents who could keep up with a trained CIA officer, Platt believed. If the FBI used local agents against him, Howard would play them like fools.
But Gerber had never liked Platt, and he had little time for him. The last thing he wanted now was to have Platt freelancing, and he didn’t bother telling Platt he’d already warned the FBI that Howard had taken the IO course.
Irritated at getting the brush-off from Gerber, Platt used his personal contacts at the bureau to arrange for the agents handling the Howard investigation to officially request an interview with him. On September 9, he briefed FBI Special Agents Bob Noonan and Mike Anderson on Howard’s training. He told them that he’d evaluated Howard as an above-average student and that Howard had gone up against the FBI’s best surveillance teams and done well. By now, both Gerber and Platt had warned the FBI that Howard was a man with a dangerous combination of skills and cunning.
At the same time, the FBI was taking an interest in another former CIA employee, William Bosch. After a disastrous tour as a case officer in Bolivia, Bosch had been fired by the agency. In February 1984, Bosch and Howard met in New Orleans to commiserate, and Howard suggested that he and Bosch join forces to get even with the agency that had dismissed them. Why not go to Mexico City and volunteer to the Soviets? Bosch stared at him. Was he kidding? Later, Bosch claimed he had serious doubts about Howard from that time on.
Bosch was living on South Padre Island off the Texas coast when two FBI agents began to ask about him at a nearby apartment complex where he had once lived. Bosch, who by coincidence was in the management office at the time, overheard them and told them who he was. The two FBI agents were not prepared to deal with him directly and waved him off, claiming they were looking for someone who spelled his name differently.
But Bosch wasn’t buying that story, and he called Howard in Santa Fe to complain. He told his friend he thought the CIA was snooping around him, using phony FBI credentials. Howard, by now convinced that his telephone was tapped, didn’t say much during Bosch’s phone call. But he realized that the FBI was looking for Bosch because of him. And he knew he’d said some incriminating things to Bosch. The most revealing conversation had occurred just two and a half months earlier, on South Padre Island. Howard had told Bosch that he had taken the final step against the CIA. “I did it,” Howard had told Bosch. “I’m really playing hardball. What do you want, five, ten, fifteen thousand dollars?”
Howard would later tell Bosch that he was only joking, but Bosch came away from the outing convinced his friend’s life had become very complicated indeed.
The FBI would not learn this until September 21, almost seventy-two hours later.
Santa Fe, 1330 Hours, September 19, 1985
The call came at 1:30 on Thursday afternoon. Special CIA Security Agent Jerry Brown told Howard there was an important matter he needed to discuss with the FBI. As David Wise wrote in his 1988 book on the Howard case, the FBI wanted Howard to meet them at the Santa Fe Hilton, a short walk from Howard’s office in the state capitol. Howard agreed.
Jerry Brown’s partner in the planned initial confrontation was Special Agent Michael Waguespack, who was widely recognized as one of the most effective interviewers in the bureau. Phil Parker, one of the key FBI officials running the Howard investigation, had handpicked Waguespack for the interview. Brown was there to provide depth and continuity; he was the “sound man,” the agent most familiar with the telephone tap coverage of the Howard home and thus most familiar with Howard’s state of mind.
Howard arrived at the Hilton to find Brown and Waguespack and his former CIA supervisor, Tom Mills, whom he had not seen in over a year. Mills’s role was to nudge Howard into talking openly to the two FBI agents. After he had given his words of encouragement, Mills left the hotel room. And Edward Howard’s life began to crumble.
Waguespack opened the interview by showing Howard a copy of a Washington Post story on the defection of Oleg Gordievsky to Britain. Waguespack told Howard that Gordievsky had identified Howard as a Soviet agent. That was a lie, a cover story dreamed up by the FBI to protect Yurchenko, whose defection had not yet been publicly reported.
Howard denied the accusation, and Waguespack asked him if he would take a polygraph. Howard said bitterly he would never take another polygraph; that was what had destroyed his career at the CIA. He said he wanted to get a lawyer, and Waguespack told him he had twenty-four hours.
Back at his office, Howard called his wife, Mary, and hurriedly told her that the FBI was accusing him of being a Soviet agent. Howard then drove home, and now the FBI surveillance was open and obvious all the way to his neighborhood. As he drove up to his house, Howard saw two FBI agents trying to talk to his wife. Howard went into his house and immediately called his lawyer, Mort Simon, and told him what was going on. Simon told him not to talk, and Howard went out to get Mary and pulled her away from the agents.
Within an hour, Howard’s psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Dudelcyzk, called to say that the FBI had been asking about him. Howard tried to explain and asked Dudelcyzk for a prescription of tranquilizers so he could calm down.
That night, Howard called Bosch and revealed that the FBI was after him, not Bosch. Finally, before going to bed, he walked around his neighborhood to check out the surveillance. He spotted a utility van not far from his home.
South Padre Island, Texas, 0600 Hours, September 20, 1985
An insistent knock at the door of his beachfront cond
ominium rousted Bill Bosch out of bed. Two men identifying themselves as FBI agents said they wanted to talk to him about his relationship with Edward Lee Howard. Bosch talked briefly with the agents and agreed to meet them again the next day for a polygraph examination.
In Santa Fe, meanwhile, Howard was acting cool. His boss in the state legislature, Phil Baca, had been interviewed by the FBI and knew Howard was in trouble, but he was surprised at how calm Howard seemed. In a formal presentation that morning, Howard didn’t appear to be a man under intense pressure. After lunch, Howard told Baca he needed to take the rest of the afternoon off before a business trip to Austin, Texas, scheduled for Monday. Howard then told Baca that he might be contacted by federal officials, who might ask him questions about him and his travels. It was no big deal, Howard assured him.
After he left the capitol, Howard withdrew $300 from his bank account, stopped by Mort Simon’s office to get the name of an Albuquerque attorney who specialized in federal criminal law, and then drove home to pick up Mary to go shopping. As he and Mary pushed their basket through the aisles of the Santa Fe Safeway, Howard recognized and approached a member of the FBI surveillance team and said he wanted another meeting. The rattled FBI agent made a quick call and then told Howard that Jerry Brown would be waiting for him at the Santa Fe Hilton.
In a brief meeting with Brown and Waguespack, Howard said he would have a criminal attorney by Monday and that he was canceling his Austin trip. They could get together on Monday. By the end of the day on Friday, the FBI believed it had matters under control in Santa Fe.
Moscow, September 20, 1985
In what was to become a recurring nightmare for the CIA, the press release summed up the disaster in clinical language:
Tass is authorized to announce:
The USSR State Committee for Security has uncovered and arrested an agent of the U.S. special services—A. G. Tolkachev, a worker in a Moscow research institute. The spy was caught in the act of passing secret materials of a defense nature to Paul M. Stombaugh, an officer of the American CIA, who acted under the cover of second secretary of the U.S. embassy in Moscow.
It has been established that the American special services provided Tolkachev with specially designed miniature cameras with which he photographed secret documents, as well as with the means of codes, ciphers, and rapid acting two-way communications radio sets, and other materials for espionage work. Potent poisons which had been given to the spy by the Americans were also seized.
The contents, along with instructions from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, discovered at Tolkachev’s residence, indicate that his use as a spy was linked with the CIA’s plans to conduct large-scale subversive activities against the Soviet Union. The investigation continues.
It was no surprise. Still, the Tass announcement darkened the mood at Langley.
Santa Fe, 0900 Hours, September 21, 1985
Edward Lee Howard was moving methodically. He had stalled the FBI until Monday, but that meant he had to make his move now. His training began to kick in. At about 9:00 A.M., Howard and his wife left their house, and for more than two hours they drove around town looking for places that he could use to elude his FBI surveillance. He was planning to employ a tactic he had learned in the IO course: He would jump from a moving car while his wife drove around a corner. It was the old CIA trick of moving through the gap, taking advantage of the few seconds when they would be out of sight of surveillance. But Howard’s plan came with a twist: As soon as he jumped out of the car, his wife would activate a pop-up dummy to take his place. By the time the surveillance picked them up again, they would still see two people sitting in the car. The dummy (“JIB” in CIA parlance, for “jack-in-the-box”) was crude, but at night and from behind, it could fool them long enough for Howard to make his escape.
Back home, Howard made a tape recording for his wife to use of a call to his psychiatrist, so that it would seem as if he wanted to set up an appointment later that week. That afternoon, a baby-sitter came to take care of their toddler, Lee. Howard and his wife told the sitter they were going out to dinner in Santa Fe. After saying good-bye to his son at about 4:30 P.M., Howard drove off with Mary.
Somehow, the FBI surveillance team missed them and didn’t realize that Howard had left his home. Although the bureau had a trailer parked a few hundred feet away with television monitors scanning the area and a clear line of sight of the route out of the neighborhood, the rookie agent inside the trailer didn’t see the couple drive away. Phillip Parker, then the top deputy in the FBI’s counterintelligence division, recalls that the FBI had surveillance units nearby, ready to follow Howard. But they had to be told when Howard left his house, so they could get into place to follow him. And since the rookie in the trailer never told them he was out of pocket, they didn’t know it was time to start tracking him.
“The choke point was the man watching from the trailer, and the big mistake was to put a first-office agent there,” says Parker.
Of course, Howard didn’t know he wasn’t being followed, so he and Mary went through with their elaborate plans to evade the FBI. They ate dinner at a Santa Fe restaurant, and Howard called home to talk to their baby-sitter, thinking that would lull the FBI’s monitors, reassuring them that they knew exactly where Howard was. But again the FBI missed the signal; no one picked up on the fact that Howard was at a restaurant calling home, not inside his house making an outgoing call.
Howard drove away from the restaurant at about 7:00 P.M., with his wife behind the wheel. At the turn he had identified that morning, he popped up the Jib and then jumped out of the car into some bushes. Mary drove on, and Edward Lee Howard was “black” in the Santa Fe night.
When Mary arrived back home, the FBI agent in the trailer was stunned; he didn’t know the couple had ever left the house. But with the Jib in the front seat beside her, the agent breathed a sigh of relief. At least they were both back now.
The FBI was having greater success that day with William Bosch on South Padre Island. The former CIA officer had agreed to take a polygraph examination and told the FBI about his conversations with Howard. He told the FBI how Howard had suggested they get back at the CIA by going to Mexico City to volunteer to the Soviets. Most ominously, he told the agents how Howard had said to him, “I did it.” With Bosch’s statements, the FBI seemed on the verge of obtaining the probable cause needed for an arrest. But that could come Monday.
Meanwhile, Howard made his way to his empty office at the state capitol, typed a letter to Phil Baca, and caught a hotel shuttle van for the Albuquerque airport. Ironically, the shuttle made a stop in front of the Santa Fe Hilton—where the FBI agents waiting to interrogate Howard were staying. But again the FBI missed him, and Howard’s trip to Albuquerque was uneventful. He hopped on the first flight available, to Tucson, Arizona, and soon was gone, having successfully made the FBI’s surveillance agents look like a bunch of Keystone Kops.
After spending the night at an airport motel, Howard got on an early-morning flight for St. Louis and New York. He sat next to movie star Lee Marvin on the first leg of the trip. They chatted about the book Howard was reading—Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. Howard changed planes again in New York and was on his way to Europe by Sunday night, just as the FBI was finally discovering that he was gone.
13
Montreal, September 24, 1985
Chuck Medanich, playing the role of father confessor, had been bracing for the worst all the way up from Washington. Medanich had a gift for reading people, for understanding the human heart, and he knew that this CIA-sponsored hunt for the love of Vitaly Yurchenko’s life was a long shot at best.
Yurchenko had come to America two months earlier without his wife or daughter or his adopted son, and, in truth, he showed no great remorse about leaving them behind in Moscow. To be sure, he had made it clear to the first CIA officer he met when he walked into the U.S. embassy in Rome that he wanted his defection kept quiet, in the hope that the Soviet a
uthorities would not feel compelled by bad publicity to punish his family. Having cast his lot without them, Yurchenko felt a responsibility to ensure that they were treated correctly by the Soviet authorities. Without proof that he had defected, the legalistic Soviets would have to move cautiously against his family.
Yurchenko’s dream of a new life in the West did not include his wife. It revolved instead around his secret love, Valentina Yereskovsky. Vitaly and Valentina—they had fallen in love years earlier when they had been thrown together in the Soviet diplomatic community in Washington. From 1975 until 1980, Yurchenko had served as the security officer in the KGB’s Washington Rezidentura, while Valentina, the wife of a Soviet diplomat, had been working as the pediatrician for the Soviet community. Yurchenko fell in love, and he yearned to someday, somehow, escape with her for a life far away from the complications of marriage and KGB security.
Sitting in a safe house in Virginia, Yurchenko fondly recalled the romantic Washington that he and Valentina had shared so briefly. The two had parted when Yurchenko was transferred back to Moscow, leaving the KGB officer to build dreams of a new world around his love for Valentina. Eventually he came to believe that Valentina would be ready to fly away with him on a moment’s notice. All he needed to do was show up.
The CIA agreed to arrange a dramatic reunion between Vitaly and Valentina in Montreal, where her husband was now posted. The risks for the CIA and for Yurchenko were high, but perhaps Valentina would indeed come away with her lover and Yurchenko’s outlook on his new life would brighten. Yurchenko had come to trust Medanich, so the plainspoken Texan would travel with the Russian and help him through the trauma of this reunion.
The Main Enemy Page 13