The Rest Is Classified - 67. The Great Betrayal: Defecting to Moscow (Ep 2)

Episode Date: July 22, 2025

How do you switch sides and become a spy for the KGB? When the FBI is tracking you, how do you escape the country? And what is life like for a traitor on the other side of the Iron Curtain? Join David McCloskey and Gordon Corera as they discuss the life of Edward Lee Howard, his defection, and whether recent events mean there may soon be more like him. ------------------- Order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Email: [e-mail] Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@triclassified⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm going to give it some drama. Get ready. Give it some twang. Yeah. Yeah. I can't do twang. I'm not doing accents. I'll give it drama rather than accents.

There we go. Do a German accent for no reason. We near the junction of Canyon Road and Old Picass Trail near St John's College in Santa Fe. This was where the road dipped, turned to the right with substantial hedges planted along the right side. As we came up to the jump point I turned and looked at Mary. Her face was serious and her eyes were moist with tears. Our marriage and our love were both on the line. Goodbye, babe, I said. And Mary slowed to five miles an hour. I moved to the outboard side of the seat, flipped up the dummy, put my hat on it, opened

the door, jumped out and shoved the door closed as I jumped. I tried to hit the ground running, but landed hard and rolled into the bushes." Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And that was Edward Lee Howard in his memoir describing a dramatic moment we're going to be coming to in this episode. It is not the best piece of prose ever written, is it David? It may be. You know what? It makes me want a shirt that has his face on it that just says goodbye babe on it.

I mean, it just shows not every former CIA officer can write David. It makes me. Yeah, it does make me feel better as a writer, Gordon. I mean, I feel terrible that he ends up betraying the agency, but I feel secure that I can write slightly, slightly better than he can, I hope. I hope. Dear God, I hope. Yeah, I think your novel, which I'm just going to plug seventh floor out in paperback in the UK- Oh, thanks, Gordon. ... has slightly better prose than Edward Lee Howard managed in his memoir. So that is saying something, by the way. That's a compliment. So we left Edward Lee Howard last time,

and he'd been expelled, in his words, dramatically and suddenly, but clearly for some reasons from the CIA, just before he was going on this prize posting to Moscow, having already been briefed on some of the CIA's deepest secrets in Moscow. And it's fair to say he's going to seek out his revenge as his life kind of spirals out of control. And there's plenty to say he's going to seek out his revenge as his life kind of spirals out of control. And there's plenty of drinking drugs last time and there's going to be more this time. So if you're playing the drinking game, the Edward Lee

Howe drinking game, get ready. Which is a hard game to play, I guess, in the way we've done it, because we're not actually talking about specific moments where he's actually taking a drink of something. So it's just sort of a general, make yourself a nice drink, but don't do anything stupid, you know, we would say, as we're not encouraging illicit behaviour or irresponsible behaviour on this podcast. So he's in shock, isn't he? He's been thrown out the CIA and he's in a bad way, isn't he, David? He's in a bad way. And he's going to be in an even worse way, Gordon, because he's moving to

Albuquerque, New Mexico. That's a bad thing. Breaking Bad territory. Yet another Breaking Bad connection on this podcast. It's downright spooky at this point. He's going to get a job in Albuquerque as an economist with the state government. He is really angry at the CIA, which I guess makes sense. He's drinking heavily in this period because he is so angry and depressed.

And he starts to do some weird things. So one of them is he begins to make drunken calls from New Mexico to the US embassy in Moscow, which is not what you're supposed to do. He leaves messages for CIA officers working undercover there. And in one instance, he leaves a message for COS Moscow, our chief of station Moscow, saying that he won't be showing up for his physical. Now, which the course COS Moscow already knows, because he would have been in the pipeline for Moscow. He's pulled from the pipeline.

The chief of station Moscow very clearly understands that Edward Lee Howard is not showing up for his physical. So it raises this question of why in the world Edward Lee Howard is calling the station in Moscow. Because that is a line which the Russians, the Soviets, would be tapping, the KGB would be tapping that line and they are going to hear someone calling up. Now, to me, that feels like it is someone either who's gone nuts, or who is trying to signal potentially to the KGB that he is someone who knows secrets and is a loose cannon. So to me, that feels like he's already got this idea when he's doing that, that he wants to either approach the KGB or be approached by the KGB. Because I mean, I know with, you know, for instance, Oleg Gordeevsky at one point has a phone call, I think, with someone in

which he says something deliberately, kind of suggesting he is unhappy with Soviet policy, I think it's after the Prague Spring, and he does it knowing the line is tapped, hoping that it will get attention to him. So I feel like Howard is doing this at this point. I think that is undoubtedly what he is doing. And I think his behaviour to come will suggest that he is certainly not risk averse and he's willing to take massive risks, but he's not nuts, right? He's not some lunatic. I mean, he might be doing these things because he's drinking heavily, he's probably contributing to this. He's in a fog in this period. But if you want the KGB to know that A, you've been fired and B, you know everybody in Moscow

and know a lot of interesting information about the station in Moscow and thereby might know some things about assets that the station is running in Moscow. This is a great way to do that, right? Is to call these numbers and basically indicate that you're interested in being contacted. And the Soviets, by the way, they would have known that he was being slated to arrive. They wouldn't have known that he was CIA, but they would have put in at that point for his visa. Yeah. Yeah. So the CIA should realize at this point that he is a major problem, he being Howard, but Gordon, and this is classic CIA fee behavior here. The CIA doesn't tell the FBI.

Right. Don't tell the Feebs. Don't tell the Feebs. Because they don't like them. They don't trust them. They don't want to tell the Feebs, right? They don't want to admit. I think they don't want to admit they've got a guy who's a problem. And that's going to come back to bite them. So, Edward Lee Howard has put out this kind of come get me notice to the KGB. The CIA probably should have told the

FBI, but they don't. And in February of 1984, there's another weird incident. So like all good nights in New Mexico, it starts with Edward Lee Howard having about six beers at a bar and planning to go shooting, right? Because that's obviously what you would do after you drink six beers. We should also note Edward E. Howard is a bit of a gun nut. He's a gun enthusiast, which would not be uncommon.

Living in the American West, certainly, right? But he's very drunk. He's wasted. He goes to a bar, which is also a fun thing to do, I guess, after you have six beers in Santa Fe. So he goes to a bar and he stares at a another gentleman's girlfriend in what seems like a very leering and suggestive way. And then he follows this couple out of the bar tailgates them as they're driving home. And I guess Edward Howard is also driving his car, which seems ill-advised. These guys dropped the girl off. And then of course, because Howard has been following them, they're like, what is this guy doing?

They have a confrontation in which Howard pulls out a.44 Magnum, which is the dirty Harry gun, by the way. From the film, yeah, the kiddies of the film. And apparently, Edward Lee Howard says, and here Callum should get his bleep gun ready, he says, this is a Magnum, and I don't give a. And then he threatens the guys, and he asks where the girl is, which also seems insane.

And the guys initially try to back off. Cause of course this lunatic has just pulled the dirty hairy gun on them, but Howard trains the gun on him. There are shots that ended up getting fired. Howard ends up in a headlock, the gun gets taken, and one of the guys apparently hits him on the head with a rock. I like the fact even though he's the one with the 44 magnum, he's the one who ends up in a headlock. He loses the fight. The mid-80s are sort of a dark period for Edward Lee Howard, I think. This is a rough patch. This is slightly spiraling out of

control, isn't it? I mean, you know, he's gone from CIA officer to to Moscow to a drunk to getting into a fight with with people that you know, and these guys work at Pizza Hut, he's getting in a drunken brawl with Pizza Hut employees, but it is a really important moment in Edward Lee Howard's journey to eventually commit espionage, because I think his secret self in some ways bursts out into the open, right? In public at this point, he's an economist working at the state government of New Mexico.

He's drinking too much, but he's a respectable guy in the eyes of pretty much everybody in the community, right? At this point, nobody knows why he's left the CIA. His resume wouldn't even say CIA. Nobody would have any clue that he had been fired. And now all of a sudden, he's gotten into a brawl with a gun with Pizza Hut employees out in the open. And he gets five years probation. And I really think that what comes next maybe doesn't happen without the fight and the arrest. Because the CIA then reach out and offer psychiatric care. There's a court-appointed psychologist

who delivers a treatment plan to Edward Lee Howard that apparently includes deep breathing exercises and self-hypnosis, which he probably needs because at this point, Howard's in-laws have moved in with him for like months and they'd moved in prior to the arrest. So this home environment can't be great. He's got his in-laws there.

He's got a young kid, you know, he's been fired from the CIA. He's drinking way too much. He's under a lot of stress. He ends up having to borrow 7,500 bucks from his in-laws to pay the kid whose car he's shot up and to pay for his own therapy, his court-ordered therapy, right? So this is a bad sitch, Gordon. And Things Are Bad would be the title of this chapter in the Edward Lee Howard story. And

he's going to get more and more thirsty for revenge. And it's very interesting, isn't it? It's the exact chronology of how and when he approaches the KGB and the Soviets is a little bit murky, isn't it? He's obscured it purposefully. Yeah. Because he claims he never approaches them in the US himself. And he, I think, admits at one point that he sits outside the Soviet consulate in Washington in October 83, debating whether to go in or not, which is an odd thing to do. And he claims that he didn't go in. But his claims that he never contacted them in the US are slightly contradicted by the memoir of a KGB officer based in the US,

Victor Chakashin. You always got to be slightly careful about KGB memoirs, but he seems to suggest that there was a contact that Howard actually does walk in. So I think the indications are that he is going to kind of walk in even if he's going to deny it. Well, in that chronology, which I think makes some sense, Howard may have sent the signals and maybe nothing happens. And so he essentially walks in to the consulate in DC. And frankly, he would have known, I think, Gordon, probably the surveillance or maybe would have had some insight into the surveillance schedules that the FBI may have had on the consulate. So he could have timed walking in when there wouldn't have been FBI eyes and ears outside to see what's going on outside. And so he's particularly uniquely positioned to walk in to the Soviet consulate than anybody else.

And that would have been a great way to make the KGB aware of what he wanted to do. And it's a huge moment, isn't it? Because he is going from suggesting he might be interested to actually crossing the line from being a kind of dropout who's a huge mess to being a traitor. This is the moment. You are a former CIA officer full of secrets, and you are walking into the Soviet consulate in Washington DC. But that does seem to be the moment he finally does that. And then I think the suggestion is that through that walk-in moment, they're going to realize he's interesting, and there's going to be a plan then, because they obviously can't go

on meeting in the US because it's too much surveillance. Yeah, you don't want to do the meet in the US. No, you don't want to meet in the US. So he's going to go on holiday, I think, into Europe, isn't he? And that's where the contact is really going to begin, it looks like. Yeah, it seems it was the fall, probably September of 84. He takes a trip, apparently cashes in his life insurance policy to pay for it, probably because he presumed he was going to get paid on the back end of it by the Russians. But he takes Mary and their son on a

trip to Switzerland, Italy, and Austria in September of 84. And it's probably the case that somewhere on this trip, probably Vienna, he meets the Russians, right? And that meeting is hugely significant because he is now crossing over into a very infamous group, small group of CIA officers who have ever committed treason. Now, it's probably the case and David Wise, the journalist has written an account of Edward Lee Howard's life and times that I think is more accurate than Edward Lee Howard's own memoir. He says that Howard may have fabricated the existence of an economics conference in Milan and then use that as cover to sneak into Vienna of an economics conference in Milan and then use that as cover to sneak into Vienna for meetings with the KGB.

It seems that there's a few more meetings in early and mid 1985, right? Where he's essentially being handled by the Russians, right? Now Howard doesn't have any new information, right? He's not actually working at the CIA at this point, but he's got a lot of very valuable stuff that the Russians want. He probably gives away Tolkachev in one of these early meetings. Again, probably doesn't know Tolkachev's real name, but from reading those GT sphere, it's just Tolkachev's cryptonym from reading those spherephere reports, probably would have had his address, right, where he worked. So plenty to identify him. He gives

up that sensitive cable tapping operation, the one where he had cheated by putting cardboard in his backpack instead of the weights. That was exceptionally valuable. It actually is enabling the CIA to listen in on communications between a nuclear weapons research institute and the Soviet Ministry of Defense, listing into really high-level conversations. He blows that. And in return, he gets money. He's going to buy Rolex, he gets gold coins, he gets Krugerins. He opens a Swiss bank account that's later found to have $150,000 in it. And to put that in perspective, it's about maybe four times what he's earning annually as an economist with the state government of New Mexico. So you know, it's a big chunk of change in the mid 80s. $10,000 worth of those Krugerins

end up in a metal box buried in the desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. So we have some buried treasure as part of the story as well. And it looks like things are on the up and up, I guess, for Edward Lee Howard here, he's sold another human being down the river for money, which is a really despicable money and revenge, money and revenge, revenge gets to stick his middle finger up at the CIA, make some cash, right. And the CIA, of course, at this point,

know that he's deeply troubled, but the CIA doesn't know what he's doing. But then, in August of 1985, a KGB officer named Vitaly Yurchenko defects in Rome to the CIA. And one of the very first questions that's gonna be asked in any debriefing of a Russian intelligence officer who's come over to our side is, do you have any information about

penetrations of our service? Right? So do you know of any KGB penetrations inside the CIA? And Yurchenko says, yes. Now he doesn't know Edward Lee Howard's name. But he says that a CIA officer codenamed Robert had volunteered in the fall of 1984. He doesn't know his real name, but he knows that this Robert had met the KGB in Vienna in the fall of 84. And that the officer had been preparing for this is critical, the officer had been preparing for a posting in Moscow, but had been taken for this is critical the officer had been preparing for a posting in Moscow, but had been taken off that assignment and fired. Well, that kind of narrows things down a little.

It does. It's not going to take a counterintelligence genius. It's not going to take George Smiley to work out. No, but it's Edward Lee Howard. I mean, that is as good as a smoking gun as you can get in this kind of investigation, isn't it? I mean, he totally fits the description. That's right. And now the CIA finally tell the thieves what's going on. But of course, at this point, he's already done done his damage. By September of 85. So a month or so after the agency has learned that that Howard has in fact spied for the Russians,

the FBI puts him under surveillance at home and they tap his phone. And so the CIA are telling the Fiebs that Howard had been training for Moscow and that he had gone through, you know, this sort of rigorous denied areas operations where he's trained against some of the most elite FBI surveillance and counter surveillance groups in the Bureau, right? And so they're saying, look, you need to put your best people on this. And the Bureau has the surveillance crew known as the G's. I think the full acronym is SSG. It's

like the Special Surveillance Group. Howard would have trained against them in the denied area operations course. And the CIA says you got to put you you gotta put the Gs on it. The FBI doesn't, I think, do that. They don't take this quite as seriously as the CIA seems to think they should. And also probably the FIBs are pissed because the CIA has been sitting on this.

And when they look at the chronology, they're probably thinking, well, this guy's already been out for a few years. I mean, you could have told us, you know, but you didn't. It ends up being the case that Howard spots the surveillance right away, right? Like right away. So Howard mentioned seeing a green sedan in his neighborhood driven by a young guy with a baseball cap. It looks like he's watching him. It's kind of cruising slowly past Howard's

house. Apparently it looks really angry when he's staring at Howard. So Howard, you know, instantly is like, okay, it's almost comic. It hasn't, you know, something has gone wrong. The Phoebs are watching me. But in here's the problem is that there's not enough information that the FBI can use to prosecute Howard. Yeah, because I suppose all they've got is is your Chenko's lead and tip off him, rather than any actual evidence of, of money or secrets being passed, which you'd need to prosecute. That's right. So they know it's him, but they don't have anything to get him with.

This dear listeners slash watchers of our show is another point where Gordon Carrere in the notes said, let's not get hung up here on the legalese because I have a paragraph on the espionage act. But I'm gonna do it for spite anyway. Do it. It's, Gordon looks so sad right now for the people that watch the video. He hates when I talk about the espionage act, and so have Bin Laden's wives. But the espionage act makes it hard to convict

in espionage cases. And it simply is because you have to basically demonstrate intent to commit espionage. And it means that they have to catch them in the act, right? Because the Yurchenko information, if you're the CIA, do you want that in the courts? Do you want Yurchenko to actually stand up and testify? Absolutely not, right?

I mean, it's not gonna happen. So the bar is really high, the Fiebs need to prove intent, and what they decide to do is hope that they could actually get him to confess. So they, the Fiebs bring Edward E. Howard into a meeting at the Hilton Hotel in Santa Fe, and they show Howard a picture of Oleg Gordievsky, who has just affected to your island, Gordon,

to Britain. And it's interesting, because they they're going to suggest to him that Gordievsky knew about Howard and has revealed that Howard's a spy. Now that's actually not true. So they're bluffing, but they're using the fact Gordievsky is kind of out, and it's public that he's out to try and kind of pressure him. So it's bluffing him basically to try and get a confession from him. But he doesn't crack, does he?

No, no. And again, I mean, he's, you know, he's gone through some basic training at the farm and FTC on how do you handle an interrogation. So he's, you know, he's been through this before. So Howard says he says he needs time to find a lawyer. But in reality, Gordon, he's making other plans. And so maybe there would take a break. And when we come back, we'll see how Edward Lee Howard makes his great escape. See you after the break. And when we come back, we'll see how Edward Lee Howard makes his great escape. See you after the break.

I'm David Oleshoge. And I'm Sarah Churchwell. Together, we're the hosts of Journey Through Time, where we explore the darkest depths of history through the eyes of the people who live through it. Today, we're going to tell you about our new series on the Great Fire of London, one of the great pivotal events of the 17th century, one of the most important events in all of English and British history. It began at a bakery on Pudding Lane and quickly turned into a catastrophe. It consumed 13,000 houses, it decimated London,

and caused £10 billion worth of damage in today's money. It even burned down the iconic St. Paul's Cathedral. The city was already devastated by the Great Plague, but rumors of foreign invasion led mobs to attack innocent foreigners on the streets. In this episode, we'll explore the chilling consequences of rumors of fake news, of xenophobia, problems that clearly are not unique to today.

From desperate attempts to save their homes and belongings, to the struggle to assign blame, which turned deadly. This is the story of the fire as it was lived through by the people on the ground and the lasting impacts it left on the city. We've got a short clip at the end of this episode. Welcome 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 is escape from that surveillance. Yes. Well, and 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. 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 legislature 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 hedge she used to put wigs on. 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. 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 DC 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 and this dummy could be inflated. They worked up very interesting ways to get them to inflate out of briefcases and this dummy could be inflated and they worked out very interesting ways to get them to inflate out of briefcases or you know cakes and things like that so it would inflate and it would look like there's somebody still in the car right yeah 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 had built in New Mexico for their escape, right?

So they 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. Right, this is right after he'd given that wonderful PowerPoint briefing. 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 drive home from the restaurant. 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 Lee Howard rolling out of the passenger seat. So 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. This is the tragedy of this, Gordon, is that even though that even though we all know from the Snowden series 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, okay? 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, you know, now been outed by a defector as a spy. 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 Gs, put the Gs 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. 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's 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, okay, they're in the home, 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 gonna 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 it's 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 up Lee Marvin, he's having a great time, probably has a few drinks. And then he connects St. Louis into New York, and then he's gone, leaves the

states. And basically, by the time the Phoebs and the CIA know that he's gone. He's in Helsinki. Yeah, he's in Finland. Now, Howard has claimed that the first time he contacts the KGB is at the Soviet embassy in Helsinki, Finland. Which we did. Which, no, well, I mean, it's just, there's not even a debate to be had, right? No, he's making that up. 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 Oleg Gordeevsky. And it's kind of the mirror image of, we talked about Oleg Gordievsky earlier, it's kind of the mirror image of Gordievsky's eggsville, just going the other direction. 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, because 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 the 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 got into the Soviet Union and he's welcomed intoably dramatic way of being, of arriving in the Soviet Union. But by this time, the CIA and the FIBS have realized they've got a problem, haven't they? Yeah, and there's lots of finger pointing, you know, of all the sort of anticipated ways. Imagine the CIA and FBI blaming each other. 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 to CIA should have worked out he was a bad and earlier and dealt with. 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. But I guess it's just a bit of complacency. I blame the FBI. Oh, that's a surprise. Surprise, David. Surprise. Yeah. I lay the blame.

Once an agency manual. The feet of the thieves. But meanwhile, Edward Lee Howard is in Moscow. He's gonna get looked after, isn't he's gonna be put in a safe house, fed caviar, smoked salmon, claims he's gonna meet the head of the KGB. They'll show him pictures to identify a whole raft of other CIA officers, right? I mean, 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, 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. You only gave details. Anyone could have gotten from a Le Carre novel, which again, I think is also total bunk, right? Yeah, 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, 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 gonna 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. 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? 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. He's left Mary behind. Yeah, he left Mary behind. He's behind withazebag. At this point in the, he's gone full sleazebag. He's left Mary behind. With their young kid. And yet when you read his memoir, he keeps mentioning, well, I was provided an attractive blonde mid-20s translator called Anna. Then 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. 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, you know, 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 you know, 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 the son, but she doesn't want to live there, maybe no great surprise. She comes out and then she goes back to the US. 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 it leaves how even more adrift, I think, you get a sense in these years. He's kind of bored, he starts partying hard, and also he kind of moves around from his memoir, he moves around the whole Soviet block, 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 about at the start, isn't it? He

can't settle anywhere. 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. They reported seeing a drunken American in a dollar bar accompanied by a burly set of bodyguards who's making a nuisance, offering to buy them drinks and trying to chat them up about football. Howard says, look, I love my country, but frankly with the FBI and CIA, I'm at war. And he'll write in that memoir that, now 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. Yeah, 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 the Moscow correspondent

for the Washington Post, interviews him in October 1990, and he says, life imitates trash fiction. 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. Yeah. He did himself. Yeah. 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, ENROC, which is basically in charge of kind of helping defectors come into the states

are essentially in some form of like witness protection. But how do you then acclimate? How do you get jobs? How do you learn the language? You know, how does 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? 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, a lot of these assets. Yeah.

And so Howard is going to write a memoir, and he calls it safe house. It's actually pretty good name. I 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 12th, 2002. Man, people falling in Russia left and right. People falling in Moscow. I know, breaking their neck. What do we think? You have a very suspicious air about you, Gordon, the scare quotes you used. Yeah, 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. Less plausible. I mean, I'm slightly unconvinced the Russians would actually bump him off. I just don't think 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 was just a theory that his death was faked so that 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 gonna be honest, that he's somewhere out there listening to our podcast. Ooh, he could redeem himself in his old age and become a friend of the pod. He could become a secret squirrel.

I think he could come on as a guest. Come on. I think that theory seems like the least plausible of all of the options, but big if true, right? Yeah, big if true. Big if true. but big if true, right? Yeah, big if true. Big if true.

I mean, and we are left, I think, as we bring this sort of sorted 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, I mean, 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 sort of the gray matter of a few people's heads,

is having this tremendous impact on the spy game. And yet, you know, these are kind of enormously consequential spies and decisions, and 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. Yeah, the great dispenser of wisdom Jerry Seinfeld has a line in the sitcom where he says people, they're the worst. That is the Edward Lee Howard story in a nutshell there. 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, you know, 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. Now it is interesting because there've 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, well, does this create the risk of more Edward Lee Howard's? 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. Even if you think, hey, look, and how he was treated to what's happened recently. 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. It's just a fact. 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. 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 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, we should try. And 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, haven't we? Just before anyone thinks that this entire podcast has been encouraging bad behavior, either on the personal drug and drink news

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. 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, 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. He was on the, you Friday, with someone who knew Edward Lee Howard. 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 therestedclassified.com. But until then, we'll see you next time. See you next time. See you next time. It's David Oleshoge from Journey Through Time. Here's that clip that we mentioned earlier. If you look at all of the accounts of the fire at this point, as we get to the end of Sunday the second, the first day, this fire is not behaving in any way the way fires traditionally did in London.

And there is some people who've argued that it was becoming a firestorm, that the heat and the wind and the movement of air caused by the fire was feeding, it was becoming self-sustaining as it were. John Evelyn, who's a great writer and a diarist of this moment, he talks about the sound of the fire. He said it was like thousands of chariots

driving over cobblestones. There are descriptions in Peeps and elsewhere of this great arc of fire in the sky. I mean, imagine that everything around you is colored by the flames, yellows and oranges, and above you is this thick black smoke. This is a city you know, these are streets you walk, this is a place that's deeply familiar to you, and it looks completely otherworldly. It looks like another, like a sort of landscape you've never seen before. People describe the

fire almost as if it's supernatural. If you want to hear the full episode, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.