Edward Lee Howard
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Edward Lee Howard (born in New Mexico 1951; died 12 July 2002 in Moscow) was a CIA case officer who defected to the Soviet Union.
Howard served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bucaramanga, Colombia. There he met Mary Cedarleaf in 1973, and they were married three years later in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1976, Howard earned a master’s degree in business administration from the American University in Washington, DC and Howard joined USAID. In February 1977, the Howards left for two years in Lima, Peru, where he worked on loan projects. Although the CIA sometimes uses USAID as diplomatic cover, there is no evidence to suggest that Howard was anything but a loan officer. After Peru, the Howards returned to the United States, and he went to work in Chicago for a company doing environmental work. [2]
Howard was hired by the CIA in 1980 and was later joined by his wife, Mary, where they were both trained in intelligence and counter-intelligence methods. Shortly after the end of their training and before going on their first assignment, a routine polygraph test indicated that he had lied about past drug use, and he was fired by the CIA in 1983 shortly before he was to report to the CIA’s station at the American embassy in Moscow.[1]
Disgruntled over the perceived unfairness of having been dismissed over accusations of drug use, petty theft and deception, he began to abuse alcohol. He then began making mysterious phone calls to some former colleagues, both in Washington and in Moscow. At some point he began providing classified information to the KGB.
In 1985, the CIA was being shaken by several security leaks that led to exposure of agents and assets. On August 1, 1985, after twenty-five years of service in the KGB, Vitaly Yurchenko walked into the US Embassy in Rome and defected to the United States. In the following interrogations by the CIA, he accused Howard and another agent, Ronald Pelton, of working for the KGB. In November of that year, Yurchenko himself re-defected back to the USSR. It is possible that Yurchenko was acting as a double agent, seeking to fool the CIA with wrong leads to protect one of the USSR’s then most important CIA traitors, Aldrich Ames.
While living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Howard used his CIA training to evade the FBI and fled the US for Russia before he could be arrested. For the last nine years of his life Howard passed secrets to Robert Eringer who was working undercover for the FBI Counterintelligence.[2] He died on July 12, 2002 at his Russian dacha supposedly from a broken neck after falling on stairs, [3] [4]. Cursory investigation of the cause of his death has been inconclusive, with assassination and murder being the possible causes.
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[edit] References
- ^ Howard describes this experience in Chapter 4 of Safe House: The Compelling Story of the Only CIA Operative to Seek Asylum in Russia (Bethesda, MD: National Press Books, 1995). [1]
- ^ Potomac Books—Ruse: Undercover with FBI Counterintelligence
- ^ “Deaths,” The Post-Standard (Syracuse), July 24, 2002, p. A-2
- ^ Ronald Kessler, The CIA at War (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003) p. 151
