Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  That evening, Gennady appeared at Dion’s small room, but before they could settle in, Dion took a camera from his suitcase and asked the Russian to pose.

  “What, the FBI doesn’t have enough pictures of me already?” asked Gennady.

  “Well, this is going to be a special shot,” answered Dion.

  Then Gennady was jumped from behind by someone (a thug?) who had been hiding in the closet, as Dion clicked away on his Nikon. Was this a setup? Gennady thought for a second. When he looked down and saw that he was being hugged by a man with half a finger missing on his left hand, he broke into a huge smile, captured by Dion’s camera.

  “Cowboy! What took you so long?” Gennady laughed. “I mean to come out of the closet.” Now the two were hugging each other face-to-face.

  Jack surprises Gennady in the Pegasus Hotel, Guyana.

  “You never call me anymore,” Jack feigned like a spurned teenage girl.

  “Okay, ladies, break it up,” Dion interrupted.

  The trio caught up in the following hours, solidifying plans for the rest of the four-day trip. For the next few days, Jack, Gennady, and Dion met down at the seawall, where they picnicked, shot at tin cans, or wined and dined at the best bistros Georgetown had to offer. At the end of the trip, the two American Musketeers dutifully filed their reports, while the Russian did not. No recruitment had been attempted by any of the friends. But Jack and Dion held to their gut feelings that by merely gaining Gennady’s friendship, something good would happen one day.

  Dion and Gennady have a Caribbean picnic, spy style.

  Back in Washington that spring, Dion and Jack found their professional worlds in upheaval. While the irrepressible Russian Cowboy was left to play volleyball and sun himself among the bikinis on Guyana’s “63 Beach, Berbice,” Dion and his CI-4 Squad, and Jack and his SE Division, were considering much more sobering business: recently there had been a marked uptick in Americans spying against the US. In 1985 and 1986, there would be fourteen traitors arrested. A report written years later by top CIA mole hunter Sandy Grimes concluded that some thirty CIA operations against the Soviets had been fatally compromised.

  The KGB busted Moscow case officers Michael Sellers and Eric Sites, both of whom had to be exfiltrated back to the US. The cover of GRU (Soviet military intelligence) colonel Sergei Bokhan was blown, forcing him, after ten years of working for the Agency, to be essentially smuggled to the US. At one point in 1985, the CIA lost six Iron Curtain assets (foreign penetration agents) in six months—either known executions or “disappearances.”

  Then there was the loss, after five years of hard work, of a valuable CIA-NSA joint technical success. Code-named GT/TAW, it involved the planting of a sophisticated tape recorder and electronic bug in a sewer on the main landline cable that connected the KGB’s headquarters in Moscow to its nuclear weapons research institute south of the capital.

  “This whole place is falling apart,” Paul Redmond, the CIA’s legendary chief of Counterintelligence, concluded. “Everybody’s getting rolled up.” Although experienced CIA officers had planned their Moscow operations fastidiously—utilizing Russian clothes, Russian language, and the latest in Ian Fleming–type gadgets—they were routinely bested by their KGB opponents. The mystery was how.

  But the Americans were not alone in their travails. The Soviets had their own losses to repair, especially the losses of John Walker Jr. and Ronald Pelton, the NSA asset cultivated by Gennady.

  CIA director Casey had been correct when he speculated about a turncoat, except that he had seriously underestimated: there was more than one. Cowboy Jack would soon learn that one of the worst was among his own Zephyr IOC graduates. In late August 1985, during a regular visit to see Musketeer Dion and Lane Crocker at Buzzard Point, Jack got the sobering news that a couple he had put through the pipeline gauntlet was suspected in the exposure of one of the CIA’s best Soviet assets. Jack was crestfallen. He not only had prepared them for a Moscow Station posting but had developed a special father-daughter bond with the woman under suspicion. The couple in question was Edward Lee and Mary Howard. “Ed was always a problem, but I would have been stunned to learn that Mary had done such a thing,” Jack said.

  The Howards had both joined the Agency in 1981, after meeting in the Peace Corps years earlier and marrying in 1976. Edward had a love of James Bond movies; however, like Bond, he had a fondness for alcohol and, unlike Bond, a recreational interest in pot, hashish, cocaine, LSD, and Quaaludes. In hindsight, most at the CIA say he never should have been recruited in the first place. But incredibly, both Edward and Mary Howard were not only hired but also assigned to the elite SE Division, where they were groomed to relocate under deep cover to the most demanding station: Moscow. Most significantly, Edward was briefed on Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet engineer who for the last five years had been a valuable CIA source of Soviet fighter jet radar defense systems intel—for a CIA fee of $200,000 per year placed in an escrow account for him. When Howard landed in Moscow, he would likely become Tolkachev’s case officer.

  After completing Jack’s training, though, and before the couple was dispatched to Moscow, Howard was fired, in May 1983, after failing four polygraph tests (tests were a once-every-three-years routine for CIA personnel). He was found to be deceptive on questions regarding his drug usage and theft. Five months later, Howard, who had relocated to his New Mexico birthplace, traveled to the Soviet Consulate in DC and gave them a letter of introduction, in which he stated that he was a disgruntled ex-CIA employee. Over the next year and a half, he repeatedly visited Vienna, Austria, where he supposedly had contacts with KGB handlers.

  By 1984, then drinking heavily, Howard told a number of former colleagues that he had “been fucked” by the Agency. It got back to HQ that Howard, who was living in El Dorado, near Santa Fe, was not only drinking but admitting to his Soviet Consulate visit—a toxic combination for the CIA, which hadn’t yet known about the Vienna trips. Howard possessed too many of the Agency’s most closely held secrets about Moscow Station.

  But perhaps the greatest loss was the highly classified asset Edward Lee Howard had been preparing to handle. On June 13, 1985, engineer/asset Tolkachev missed his scheduled meeting with case officer Paul “Skip” Stombaugh. Instead of passing a cache to Tolkachev, Skip was arrested by KGB agents at the drop site and taken to Lubyanka Prison. Tolkachev had been arrested weeks earlier and taken to Lefortovo Prison, to be executed a year later.

  This was all playing out at the same time temporary KGB turncoat, Gennady’s colleague, Vitaly Yurchenko was cooperating with the CIA. He not only informed them that Ronald Pelton had given up Operation Ivy Bells;* he also had SE Division chief Burton Gerber (a constant thorn in Jack Platt’s side, and vice versa) convinced that Jack’s pipeliner Edward Lee Howard was working to help the KGB blow up Moscow Station. Yurchenko was persuasive, but the CIA had another problem child. Howard’s best friend at the Agency, Bill Bosch—who had been fired one year after Howard for currency fraud and incompetence at the Bolivia Station—was reporting some disturbing information about Howard back to his former employer. The men had stayed in close touch, and at one get-together, Howard had suggested the two buddies, both unfairly dismissed, should get revenge. With a strategy employed twenty years earlier by Lee Harvey Oswald, Howard planned to go to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City and tell them everything he knew about the Central Intelligence Agency. Bosch said he’d have to think it over. Instead he got word to the SE Division that Howard’s drinking was escalating and he was suggesting a joint espionage caper.

  In August 1985, now armed with the vital news, Jack warned Lane Crocker and others at the Washington Field Office that Howard had taken the IOC course, so only the FBI’s best personnel had a chance of catching him if he made a dash. Local field office agents dispatched from Albuquerque began watching the Howards from a distance, usually through electronic surveillance aimed at their home. On September 10, the Bureau learned from Howard’s psychiatrist that he would
likely crack under the pressure of an interrogation. Along with a half dozen other Washington-based agents, Dion Rankin, a seasoned interrogator and polygrapher, packed his bags for the trip to New Mexico.

  Two CIA officers were also packing their bags. One was Howard’s former supervisor at SE, Tom Mills, whom Howard respected, though in his enraged state after being fired, Howard had screamed at him in Mills’s driveway. Mills was designated to convince Howard to cooperate with the Bureau. The other Agency man going west was Cowboy Jack Platt, assigned to use his special rapport with Mary to convince her to do the same. Additionally, since Jack knew both the Howards, his expertise might prove critical in predicting their response. Plus, for Jack it was a chance to be in a place where his personal dress code was both appropriate and accepted.

  Dion studied the Howard case file and spent many hours preparing his polygraph questions for Bosch and the Howards before meeting Jack at Dulles Airport. “Jack and I flew down to Albuquerque together,” says Dion. “The plan was for me to polygraph Edward, then fly down to South Padre Island, Texas, to do Bosch. Jack would stay with the team in Santa Fe and babysit Mary.” On September 19, 1985, two agents called Howard and asked him to come to the Hilton Hotel in Santa Fe so they could talk. Meeting him in the lobby, the FBI men took him up to room 327, which shared a wall with room 329, where Dion and Jack waited silently with another agent for the signal to come next door to conduct the polygraph.

  Ears to the wall, Jack and Dion heard the discussion quickly escalate, as Howard began screaming at his inquisitors, refusing to be polygraphed. Clearly his drinking and bitterness over his dismissal—or perhaps the prospect of being caught spying—had him on the edge. “Howard got so aggressive that the other agent in our room pulled out his gun,” remembers Dion. “He had it inadvertently aimed at my stomach. Jack and I made him holster it before one of us got shot accidentally. We laughed about that for years.” Jack and Dion stayed in their room until it was clear that Howard had left the scene.

  Later that day, Howard actually bumped into a member of the FBI’s surveillance team in a Santa Fe supermarket. He was now calm, telling the agent that he was willing to discuss another meeting. The startled agent advised Howard that his hotel interrogators were waiting for him back at the Hilton. In a brief preliminary encounter at the hotel, Howard said he’d take the polygraph on Monday (four days later), but he would be lawyering up over the weekend. The agents breathed a sigh of relief, believing they had just scored a breakthrough.

  That night, Dion took a three-hour flight to Texas with local FBI agent Bill Koopman to polygraph Bill Bosch, while Jack stayed behind in Santa Fe, continuing to observe Howard and advise the Bureau. On Saturday, Dion and Koopman spent eight hours questioning, and ultimately polygraphing, Bosch at the Bahia Mar Resort on South Padre Island. “We told him about how one of our assets, whom Howard had handled in Moscow, had just been executed in that same city,” Dion remembers. “He admitted everything. He told us about how Howard admitted to accepting money from the KGB in Europe and about how Howard wanted Bosch to join him in the espionage.” Toward the end of the long day, Bosch began to fall apart under the strain. “He began hyperventilating, became almost hysterical,” says Dion. “But we had already poly’d him, and he passed easily.” Dion relayed the news to Lane Crocker at the Washington Field Office, and Crocker set the arrest for Monday—two days were needed to acquire the warrant. But that would prove two days too late, as Howard was already on the run.

  That very Saturday night, the Howards enlisted their regular babysitter to watch their two-year-old son, Lee, while the couple went out to dinner. That was a cover story. In truth, the pair had spent the previous night rehearsing every evasion trick they had learned from Jack. After Edward Howard kissed his son goodbye, possibly forever, he and Mary drove away, and by sheer happenstance, their Bureau minders were looking the other way.

  Wrongly assuming that the G-men were on their tail, and with Mary at the wheel, the husband and wife spies left their home at 4:30 and proceeded to have that last dinner. From there a tearful Mary drove her husband to a drop-off point they had scouted earlier in the day. The drive from the restaurant was a master class in the evasion techniques Jack had taught them in their time as Zephyrs: creating a “gap” in surveillance with hours of driving, the jack-in-a-box (JIB), and the moving car delivery (MCD) in order to lose the Bureau’s best surveillance team. Of course, no one was actually following them, so it was doubly embarrassing for Edward when he jumped from the moving car and almost broke his arm. Mary deployed the JIB and returned home. US authorities never laid eyes on Edward Lee Howard again.

  Still reeling from the knowledge that one of his trainees had betrayed his country, causing the execution of a good man and a priceless asset in Moscow (Piguzov), in addition to Tolkachev, Jack spent the next few days with Dion, hoping to learn that the woman Jack had bonded with and believed in was not also a traitor. While Jack called Mary and asked her to meet him at the High Mesa Inn, Dion prepared his questions for the polygraph session. Mary, who arrived with her mother, didn’t agree to a polygraph right away, but eventually, with Jack and a female FBI agent flown in from Los Angeles reassuring her, she relented. Additionally, she likely knew that if she failed to cooperate, Lee might be left with no parents at all. “Once she had relaxed, Mary told me everything,” Dion says, adding that she passed the polygraph test easily.

  After Mary opened up, she became a dream witness, giving up details that Jack, Dion, and the rest could never have anticipated. One evening, she mentioned that Edward possessed a Swiss bank account and had made a large deposit ($150,000, the Bureau would later learn from Swiss sources). Did she have the account number? No. Anything else? Yes. Mary said she was with him when he buried an emergency stash in the New Mexico desert, and it should still be there. She could take them there sometime if they’d like. The agents responded in unison: “We’re going now.”

  Dion remembers driving at around eleven at night in the pitch-blackness of a moonless desert night across a small stream with Mary pointing the way to a particular tree. One team member had brought a small shovel, and Dion held a flashlight. According to author David Wise, who interviewed Mary for his book The Spy Who Got Away, Mary was sobbing as the agent broke ground. He dug for only a few minutes when he hit upon a green military ammo box, crammed full of silver bars, US currency in varied denominations, Canadian coins, and two gold Krugerrands, all totaling about $10,000. Dion remembered that it also held an envelope containing a deposit slip bearing the number of the Swiss bank account.

  Before jetting back to Washington, Jack and Dion experienced another mini drama with Mary. In one of their last conversations, she disclosed that her husband had told her she would hear from him at a specific time, at a specific place, a few days after his MCD jump. Neither Jack nor Dion recall the exact day, but the place was a telephone booth in a park near her home where the couple often played with little Lee. When the phone rang precisely on time, Dion squeezed into the booth with Mary and put his ear up to the receiver. Dion can’t say for certain, but he thinks Jack had his ear up against the glass booth.

  “He’s with us” was all that was spoken from the other end, in a distinctive Russian accent. In fact, Edward Howard wasn’t in Russia yet. He was just beginning a nine-month, nine-country odyssey, looking for a place to land. The route, according to Howard, went like this: Tucson, New York, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Munich, Helsinki, Latin America for six months under an assumed name, Vienna, Budapest, and finally Moscow in June 1986.

  Jack and Dion returned to New Mexico in late October 1985 to make certain they had obtained everything Mary could offer. Once again she was polygraphed, and once again she passed. Soon came the question of whether to charge Mary as an accomplice. Jack had long ago concluded that Mary was a good person trapped in a bad place with an alcoholic. Knowing a thing or two about alcoholics himself, Jack lobbied forcefully on Mary’s behalf. “She was the codependent of an alcoholic and sh
e got caught up in his craziness,” Jack remembered. “She was a victim. We had to let her go. Plus she had a child to raise.” Jack added that Edward Lee Howard had been a handful, given the reports he received about his attitude and performance both at The Farm and in the SE Division. Mary was never charged.

  In 1983, Howard had been psychologically destroyed by his failure to ever make it to Moscow for the CIA, especially after two years of rigorous preparation. When he finally got there in 1986, it was courtesy of the KGB. In exile, the man Jack had trained coincidentally spent a good deal of his leisure time playing volleyball at Gennady’s former home, the KGB’s Dynamo Sports complex. After a few visits to Edward in Moscow, Mary eventually divorced him in 1996. Jack continued to stay in touch with her for years to come. Howard died at age fifty on July 12, 2002, breaking his neck in what some consider a mysterious fall. Dion Rankin, remembering what Jack had told him about Howard being a handful, is among the suspicious: “I think he was pushed,” having outlived his usefulness.

  Until the end of his life, and in his memoir Safe House, Howard proclaimed his innocence, asserting that he was outed by Yurchenko in order to waste precious FBI and CIA resources so that a real double agent—or double agents—would go undetected. To which Jack said, “Bullshit. The fucking quisling sold out the entire Moscow Station for $150,000. He gave up everyone’s true identity, including the asset [Vladimir Piguzov, or JOGGER] who gave me the initial background dossier on Gennady.” Jack’s anger was aggravated by his strong hunch that there was another US double agent out there.

  Soon after Howard vanished in 1985, Jack pranced into Burton Gerber’s office to deliver one terse sentence about Howard before turning on his boot heel: “I told you I knew how to fucking train people.”