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Edward Lee Howard, 50, Spy Who Escaped to Soviet Haven, Is Dead
July 23, 2002
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
MOSCOW, July 22 - Edward Lee Howard, the former C.I.A.
agent who defected to the Soviet Union in the mid-1980's
after a disappearing act in the New Mexico desert, has
died. He was 50.
"The embassy has received reports that Edward Lee Howard
died on July 12th," said Richard A. Boucher, the State
Department spokesman, confirming his death. Another
official said the department had confirmed the death with
Mr. Howard's next of kin.
Mr. Howard's death remains as mysterious as his life. The
Washington Post said he died of a broken neck in an
accident at his dacha. But in a report by RIA-Novosti, the
Russian government's news service, an unnamed Russian
foreign intelligence officer, who said he knew Mr. Howard,
denied "this version of Howard's death," but gave no
further details.
"He is indeed dead," Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, the former
K.G.B. chief, said in a phone interview. Mr. Kryuchkov, who
was imprisoned as one of the leaders of a coup against
Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1991 but who is now free, said he
had received a call informing him of the death, but refused
to give more information.
Mr. Howard fled the United States from the New Mexico
desert in 1985. In an account by David Wise in an article
in The New York Times Magazine on Nov. 2, 1986, he said
that Mary Howard helped her husband escape by driving home
from the desert with a dummy made of clothes and a wig
stand in the front seat, fooling the agent watching them.
He wrote that Mrs. Howard further aided her husband by
playing a tape recording of his voice over their telephone
to deceive F.B.I. agents who were tapping the phone.
Mrs. Howard was not charged in connection with her
husband's escape. She is said to be living in the United
States, but her whereabouts are not publicly known.
Mr. Howard turned up in Moscow the following year and was
granted political asylum on Aug. 7, 1986.
He had been forced to resign from the C.I.A. in 1983 after
failing a polygraph test about petty theft and drug use. At
the time, he had been in training to operate in Moscow as a
team with his wife.
Mr. Howard was reported to have sold information to Soviet
agents in Austria in 1984. The American authorities put him
under surveillance after receiving information from Vitaly
Yurchenko, a K.G.B. deputy chief who defected to the United
States in 1985, that appeared to incriminate Mr. Howard.
Mr. Howard's defection came during a rash of espionage
incidents. It was an embarrassment for the C.I.A. and
helped to damage the American spy network in the Soviet
Union.
A number of American diplomats were expelled from the
Soviet Union as a result of information provided by Mr.
Howard. Mr. Wise, author of "The Spy Who Got Away" (Random
House), a 1988 book about Mr. Howard, said in an interview
that the information also resulted in the execution of
Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet defense researcher, a charge Mr.
Howard denied.
"He was a very important spy," said Mr. Wise, who
interviewed Mr. Howard extensively. "He was the first
C.I.A. defector and maybe the only one we know of who left
through the K.G.B. Most of the traffic has been in the
other direction."
While admitting some contact with the K.G.B., Mr. Howard,
who released his own memoirs - ghost-written by Richard
Cote - in 1995 ("Safe House: The Compelling Memoirs of the
Only C.I.A. Spy to Seek Asylum in Russia," National Press
Books) denied he was guilty of full-fledged informing.
In Russia, Mr. Howard was given an apartment in Moscow and
a dacha in the prestigious community of Zhukovka. He lived
a "rather dull life of an ex-spy," which in those days
included monthly allowances and a poorly hidden new
identity, said Pavel Felgenhauer, a journalist and
independent military analyst.
But there were problems. Even before he came to Russia, Mr.
Howard had a severe drinking problem, said Mr. Wise.
His life passed in longing for his wife and his son, Lee,
who was born in March 1983. They were allowed occasional
visits to Russia. Mr. Howard wrote that he went to the
United States to visit them after he defected, a claim Mr.
Wise dismissed.
Though Mr. Howard seems to have been valued by the Soviet
authorities, his information appears to have been less
important than that of Aldrich H. Ames, who was arrested in
1994 for espionage after having identified many American
spies to the Soviets.
Mark Kramer, a Russian specialist at the Davis Center for
Russian Studies at Harvard, concluded that Mr. Howard
played a bigger role deflecting attention from Mr. Ames
than in his own spying. Mr. Howard "did do some damage on
his own, but it was that inadvertent contribution that was
especially important," he added.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/obituaries/23HOWA.html?ex=1028425889&ei=1&en=72bf54fd59453011
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