Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  In a country of general poverty, Howard lived like a pasha, mainly at KGB expense. “Oh, I’m comfortable,” he said, sounding like a periodontist trying to downplay the expense of his new rec room. Howard said he earned 500 rubles a month at his institute job and some “paltry” hard-currency commissions at the bank. He had access to the well-stocked diplomatic stores where Westerners bought their groceries. But he denied the KGB ever paid him major sums of money for information or for his simple presence as a defector-trophy.

  “When I got here I had one suitcase of clothes,” he said. “Basically, when I got to work, they said make sure the boy has some good clothes. That’s what Kryuchkov said. They gave me an allowance to buy clothes. Maybe a couple thousand rubles. Also, the first three months until I could work out my situation they gave me some money, some rubles. It wasn’t a big amount. I don’t want to specify how much.”

  All the guards and tails didn’t seem to bother him. “The KGB is responsible for my security. They take it seriously. Sometimes I get lectures from them about why do you not take your security seriously and so on,” he said. “But it’s my decision. I made the decision on my own to take you out to the dacha today. Kryuchkov said, ‘It’s your decision.’ They don’t like it but they said I was responsible. We have a good relationship and I respect them in regard to the security they are providing.… As long as they give me the freedom to operate—well, ‘operate’ is a bad word—but the room to move around, to associate with who I want, to do what I want, it’s okay. And they do.”

  Howard said he was even free to make his own travel decisions. In the past four years, he said, he had wandered Eastern Europe, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, France, and Canada—“for fun.” He said he had visited his wife and son in Minnesota and even gone to Cuba. I guessed he was lying, bragging for some complicated spy-versus-spy reason. And when I told him so, he got testy in a weird sort of way.

  “Cuba’s got some awfully nice beaches,” he said. “Have you ever been to Cuba and seen those beaches?”

  Howard was a small-town boy from New Mexico who grew up reading James Bond novels. Working for the Peace Corps in Colombia and the Agency for International Development in Peru, he got a taste for travel (and a bit for cut-rate cocaine). In 1980, when he was twenty-eight, he had a job interview with the CIA. “I must admit there was the aura of adventure,” he said. At first Howard remembered his original image of the CIA. “But then, after meeting some agents in the Foreign Service, I thought, hey, they’re human just like us. They like to party.”

  With his graduate degree in business administration from American University, Howard thought he’d spend his career abroad as an intelligence officer specializing in economics, “finding out what’s in people’s accounts and stuff.” Instead, in 1982, the CIA put Howard in the “pipeline” for the Moscow station. “When I told my classmates that I was going to Moscow, everybody kind of opened their mouths. ‘Ah, the Big M!’ I thought, well, I’ll put up with it and then I can name where I want to go next, like Zurich.” For months, Howard trained in Virginia and Washington, learning “dead drops” and countersurveillance techniques, putting little pieces of film in tree stumps and not blinking. He learned terms like “wet assets” (Russian terminology for liquidated spies), “honey pots” (women used as sexual lures), and “ravens” (male homosexual lures). He learned of how the agency kept the names of its “live assets” in Moscow in separate black envelopes in a basement safe.

  Howard loved the memory of it: “Ah, very holy and all that sort of thing.”

  But then Howard failed the polygraph tests and was forced to resign. According to CIA sources quoted in David Wise’s book The Spy Who Got Away, Howard began acting strangely, phoning the U.S. embassy in Moscow and leaving messages for the CIA station chief. He also admitted later that he stood outside the Soviet consulate in Washington and contemplated “going over.” There were unexplained trips to Vienna—practically an espionage playing field because of its position in Central Europe and its former status as a divided city in the days of The Third Man.

  When the CIA forced Howard to resign from the agency, they had uncovered evidence of his personal problems, especially his history of heavy drinking. When he showed up at the hotel to meet me he was carrying a shopping bag with two bags of liquor, but, he said, “that’s just for the guests.”

  “I think my drinking problems came from a lot of stress factors, especially when I was in the CIA,” he said. “And there were some adjustment problems here. No doubt about it. And now I am mainly a beer man. I admitted to myself that I can’t handle hard liquor. And that’s the big step. I got depressed the last time I drank too much.”

  It was only after the Soviet spy Vitaly Yurchenko defected to the West and reportedly told the CIA about Howard that the CIA let the FBI in on the secret and the surveillance began. Howard was living at the time in Santa Fe, working in the New Mexico legislature. Trained by the CIA in countersurveillance, Howard soon realized he was being followed and watched. He said his shadows were “incompetent” and “fools.” “I’d see the same guy all the time riding around the house. I mean, really. And then I took a trip to Seattle. I see people on the flight with me to Los Angeles, then on the flight to Seattle, and then all of a sudden back in Santa Fe.”

  Howard denied he ever had contact with the KGB until he finally defected in June 1986. Under pressure and drinking heavily at times, Howard felt he could no longer stay in the United States. In September 1985, he made his escape. Once more he used the techniques he had learned in CIA training. With his wife behind the wheel of their Jeep on the night of September 21, Howard rolled out of the passenger door. A dummy popped up in his place. Then he was gone. While her husband began a half-year odyssey through Latin America and Europe, ending with defection to the Soviet Union, Mary Howard went through a long interrogation by the FBI. According to David Wise, she admitted that her husband had collected $150,000 in a Swiss bank account and buried a small cache of Krugerrands and silver bars in an ammunition box. She also admitted that the Soviet Union had paid for her husband’s trip to Vienna in September 1984. All of which reflected rather badly on Howard’s claim that he had never had any relationship at all with the Soviet Union or the KGB until he defected. Every time the subject of that period came up, Howard looked away and said, “Let’s please get off the subject of ’85.”

  Where the United States was concerned, Howard enjoyed an exquisite sense of Schadenfreude. He was delighted with the KGB’s bugging of the U.S. embassy in Moscow and the celebrated incidents of marines romping around with Soviet spies with names like Big Raya. Howard said, “I thought it was comical, funny. I think it turned out that only one guy went to jail after all that. The rest of the guys were just normal, young, red-blooded, horny Marines. And they were having some fun with some Soviet girls. Ha! Ha!”

  At times, Howard acted as though the interview was a painful task done at someone else’s beckoning. But at other times he rose to the subject, especially that of his own innocence. It was strange to hear him discourse on one of the other spy cases of his time, the Walker family of U.S. Navy spies who sold the Soviets codes and other key military secrets. His views were one part gall, one part moral relativism. “Oh, they should answer for their crimes, but in the intelligence business it’s very difficult to say what is a crime and what isn’t. Maybe I’m trying to back off here a bit, but God, it’s a land of mirrors. I mean, it’s very hard to moralize.…”

  The long gray Saturday shoved on outside. At first, Howard played his character nicely, waxing cynical even about the KGB’s current “kinder, gentler” public relations campaign: “Oh, Americans should believe that about as much as they believe the CIA press campaign.” But as the day went by, the character seemed to drain out of Howard. He seemed to get bored with himself, bored with his story. Here was a man, after all, who was a bit player, a waterfly, in the great drama of the superpowers. And after all, wasn’t the cold war over? Who needs Ed Howard? He was no
Kim Philby or George Blake; there was no romance, no matter how perverse, about the Howard case. He didn’t “come out” for ideals or fortune. He defected, and probably sold secrets, mainly out of panic and anger.

  We drove back to Moscow and had lunch at the German beer hall on the second floor of the International Hotel. Howard hacked away solemnly at his roast chicken. All around him businessmen were laughing and hoisting their steins of beer and talking about their flights to Copenhagen and Paris and London. They were relieved to be going home.

  Howard said he was thinking of living one day with his family in a “neutral country.” “The Soviets haven’t stopped me from seeking that alternative,” he said. “I still consider it a viable option.” In the meantime, from “a material point of view, I have pretty much everything I want.” Including free court time at the Central Committee tennis courts.

  At the dacha, his second bedroom was cluttered with huge stuffed animals and other toys. They were for his son, Lee, he said. So far, Lee Howard knew only that his father did “financial work” in Moscow. “I suppose one day I’ll explain it all to him. I don’t know at what age, but I will,” Howard said. “He’ll evaluate the situation against what he knows of me as a person, whether I’ve treated him well, whether I’ve raised him well, whether I love him. And eventually, after the shock, I think it will settle down into a relationship. I mean, you look at Kim Philby’s sons. They used to visit him here regularly. They came to his funeral and everything.”

  Finally, Edward Lee Howard had nothing more to say. It was time to go back to the dacha. “I suppose they’ll call tonight and ask how it went,” he said. They probably already knew. But why did they care? I called a few days later and Howard was stone drunk. He had no idea who I was.

  Sakharov had always said that compared to the hierarchy of the Communist Party, the men of the KGB were relatively honest and well educated, even a possible breeding ground for reformist tendencies. KGB analysts and agents, he reasoned, traveled and read widely, and they knew far better than anyone else the true picture of desperation within Soviet borders and the realities beyond them. Sakharov’s thinking made sense, but it did not hit home with me until I spent a Saturday at the October movie theater on Kalinin Prospekt where the liberal wing of the Party, Democratic Platform, was holding its founding congress.

  All morning the speeches had been predictable and by predictable people. By June 1990, with the Twenty-eighth Party Congress just weeks away, it was no longer a novelty that there were democrats in the Party. In fact, in Russia, most of the key reform leaders were still Party members, including Yeltsin. But an odd thing happened. One of the Democratic Platform leaders asked everyone to pay special attention because a special guest—Oleg Danilovich Kalugin, a former major general of the KGB—had decided to speak. Kalugin had the razor-sharp features and icy glare of a movie spy. In fact, he looked like a younger Zbigniew Brzezinski. His speech was untheatrical, but stunning all the same. He described his career as a KGB operative, including stints as the press attaché in the embassy in Moscow and as the chief of foreign counterintelligence in Moscow. He did not give many details then, but later he told me how he had helped run the famous Walker spy ring and was Kim Philby’s designated “conversational partner” in Moscow: “I did not get all these medals for my good works as a Boy Scout, after all.”

  Kalugin’s message was simple: the KGB, despite any public relations campaigns to the contrary, continued to infiltrate every workplace, church, artistic union, and political group in the Soviet Union. At the same time, many KGB officers, especially younger ones, could be called “dissidents,” or at least in fundamental disagreement with the policies and ambitions of Vladimir Kryuchkov.

  “The role of the KGB hasn’t changed. It’s got a new image, but it’s the same old horse,” he said after the speech. “The KGB is everywhere—omnipresent —and this is true today. As long as they are an instrument of the Communist Party, they are going to do this. We do not murder anyone on political grounds, but we can murder a person with character assassination. Thousands and thousands of human lives and careers are broken because of the manipulation of the KGB.”

  As a specialist in foreign intelligence, Kalugin learned to speak fluent English, Arabic, and German. As an exchange student at Columbia University in 1958, he became friends with another fellow Russian—Aleksandr Yakovlev. When he was in New York, Kalugin even scored a publicity coup in The New York Times. Max Frankel, who became executive editor many years later, wrote a “man in the news” profile of Kalugin in which he was described as a “real personality kid” who liked to sneak backstage at Lincoln Center and take photographs of the ballerinas “sometimes in ungraceful poses.”

  A few days after the speech, I went to see Kalugin at his apartment in Kuntsevo, a relatively tranquil district of Moscow. He and his wife, Ludmila, lived in a special KGB building, and outside there were several black Volgas ready to take their charges to work at Lubyanka and God knows where else. It was one of the more comfortable apartments I had seen in Moscow, filled with Western appliances, a brass dog, a ceramic Cinderella, and countless souvenirs from a lifetime with the KGB.

  “Be careful of that ashtray,” Kalugin said. “One of the best African dictators gave me that.”

  Kalugin counted himself a great bibliophile. “Look at this,” he said, pointing to a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer Ward bound in red leather. “I’ve always loved him. I had it specially bound. Look at the gold lettering.” There were also spy thrillers, Europe on Five Dollars a Day, Akhmatova, Gumilyev, and a good selection of old KGB disinformation books, including the notorious White Book, which was used in the eras of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko to spread lies about the personal and political lives of the refuseniks. Moving farther along the shelves, Kalugin said that in 1971 he became the KGB’s “caretaker” for Kim Philby. “Kim had been drinking heavily. His life was going to the dogs. It was Yuri Andropov’s idea for me to help Philby. I used to go by and see him maybe once a month. I was responsible for his safety and well-being until he died in 1988. I was the first to lay a wreath on his grave.” He showed me his copy of Philby’s memoir, My Secret Life. On the flyleaf it was inscribed, “To Ludmila and Oleg, With deep gratitude and happy memories … Best, old boy, Kim.”

  The neighbors, of course, were “rather upset” at Kalugin for speaking out at the Democratic Platform meeting. Kryuchkov, who lived in an even more exalted building, had been angry with Kalugin for years. In 1987, Kalugin sent a letter to Gorbachev warning him that the KGB was out of control. The personnel of the KGB, he wrote, ought to be cut in half at the very least and ought to be put under strict legislative watch “as they do in civilized countries.” In 1989, he wrote an article for the journal International Life criticizing the KGB for its foreign operations. The article identified its author only as a major general “formerly occupied for a long period of time with questions of diplomatic activity.” Three months before his “coming out” at the October Theater, Kalugin received notice that he was being retired at the age of fifty-five.

  What Kalugin was saying now about the KGB was no more a secret to the world than what Yeltsin had said about the Communist Party. His description of the close relationship between Gorbachev and Kryuchkov as a “bad omen” was nothing original. But Kalugin’s position gave him a certain authority, and it humiliated the men in power. Here was a major general of the secret police telling virtually anyone who asked that the KGB was still the backbone of a totalitarian state. Sure he could be playing a game. But why? What was in it for him?

  Two weeks after the speech at the Democratic Platform convention, the Tass wire ticked out the announcement: Oleg Kalugin had been stripped of his military rank and decorations by order of President Mikhail Gorbachev. The military men who had ordered the slaughter of peaceful demonstrators had gone unpunished, but Kalugin was out. It was a chilling moment—in a year that was going to get a lot colder. Either Gorbachev was acting on his own or he was unde
r pressure from the KGB. It was hard to say which was worse. Either way, the Ministry of Love was still in business.

  CHAPTER 24

  BLACK SEPTEMBER

  What is written with a pen cannot be hacked away even by an ax.

  —RUSSIAN PROVERB

  In the morning twilight, the village priest opened his front gate and headed for the train platform a half mile away. It was Sunday, and Father Aleksandr Men always caught the 6:50 train from the village of Semkhoz near Zagorsk to his parish church in Novaya Derevnya, a small town thirty miles outside Moscow. He had a full day ahead of him: confessions to hear, baptisms, a lecture in the evening.

  Father Aleksandr, a robust man of fifty-five with a thick beard of black and gray, was an emerging spiritual leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. Some of his followers compared him to Sakharov, “a spiritual Sakharov.” Unlike countless other priests and church leaders, Men had kept his independence through the Brezhnev years. He refused to cooperate with the KGB. He taught underground Bible classes and published his theological works abroad under a pseudonym. He endured the harassment, sat through long searches of his home and interrogations, came home to open his mail and read death threats, threats against his wife and two children. All because he was an honest priest and served his flock honestly. But he had survived. Now, he told his brother, Pavel, he felt like “an arrow finally sprung from the bow.”