The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

“OS sent a memo over to the bureau yesterday, but they didn’t identify Howard as Mr. Robert.”

Gerber had, in fact, been frustrated the day before when the CIA’s Office of Security officials had hedged on the message they sent to the FBI concerning Yurchenko’s revelation about a Mr. Robert. Gerber had said he was convinced that Yurchenko was referring to Edward Lee Howard; he was the only person who could possibly fit the description offered by the Soviet defector. Gerber had lived with the Howard case ever since he took over SE Division a year earlier, and he knew far too much about Edward Lee Howard’s messy divorce from the CIA to think that it could be anyone else. But the Office of Security had not told the FBI of the almost certain match between Howard and “Mr. Robert,” costing the bureau a day in their investigation. Gerber had decided to bring the bureau into the loop on Saturday morning, two days after Yurchenko walked into the U.S. embassy in Rome. And that’s why we were here in Charley’s parking lot.

When he first applied to become a CIA case officer in 1980, Ed Howard had seemed like an ideal candidate, with an interesting mix of government and private-sector experiences in Latin America. An Air Force brat, he had served in the Peace Corps and the U.S. Agency for International Development in Latin America and later held a management job at a company in Chicago before his natural restlessness led him to think about working for the CIA. It was the mystique of the agency, the notion of a secret life on the edge, that had attracted him.

Howard easily admitted to past drug and alcohol use while undergoing the required polygraph test for new applicants. The CIA’s standards had recently been relaxed—the Office of Security had been forced by the realities of the 1970s to be more flexible in approving new employees who acknowledged past casual drug use, so Howard passed through the first screens of the system. Questions would later be raised, however, about whether Howard’s drug use—even the incidents he acknowledged on his polygraph—should ever have been defined as casual.

After operational training at the Farm, Howard was chosen, in early 1982, for assignment to Moscow. His wife, Mary, whom he had met in Colombia while they were both in the Peace Corps in the early 1970s, would also be trained by the CIA so she could help him in his Moscow operations. David Forden, chief of the SE Division at the time, was told by the division’s security officer that Howard had a past record of drug use, but Forden was assured that it was not significant enough to prevent Howard from being offered a sensitive post. At the time, CIA rules prohibited a division chief from examining an employee’s security and medical records himself, so Forden had to rely on the security and medical staff to tell him what was in the files.

After language school and training in Jack Platt’s Internal Operations course, Howard was assigned as a deep cover officer in Moscow. He would be given a “clean slot”—an obscure job in the embassy that had never before been used as cover by the CIA. The clean slot postings were given only to young case officers like Howard who had never served overseas before and thus would never have been identified by the KGB as agency officers.

With a well-planned and low-key arrival on the Moscow scene, KGB surveillance would pay cursory attention to clean slot officers like Howard, while concentrating on already identified American intelligence officers assigned to known cover slots. The agency had started placing deep cover officers in clean slot jobs while Gerber was Moscow chief in the early 1980s; one of Gerber’s first clean slot officers had been Dennis McMahon, a first-tour officer who had successfully handled Adolf Tolkachev. Now that Gerber was division chief, he was strongly committed to the practice of relying heavily on clean slot officers—even if they were untested rookies, like Howard.

While studying the Russian language in preparation for his Moscow assignment, Howard shared an office with Michael Sellers, another Moscow-bound case officer. During their year or so in the pipeline, Howard and Sellers spent one day a week and weekends “reading in” on the CIA’s Moscow operations. While most of the case files revealed only the cryptonyms of the Soviets working for the CIA in Moscow, Howard could have gained access to files with their true names. The Tolkachev file was enormous, enough to fill several cabinet drawers, and even if Howard did not know SPHERE’s true name, there was more than enough operational detail for the KGB to pinpoint Tolkachev, including his address.

In April 1983, just before his final clearance for assignment to Moscow, Howard was asked to take another polygraph test, a standard requirement for officers about to be assigned to a sensitive area. This time, the polygraph told a different story. Howard’s personal failings weren’t passed over. There was evidence of ongoing drug and alcohol use and an instance of petty theft—Howard acknowledged that he had stolen cash from the purse of a woman on an airplane. Under questioning on one of the polygraphs, he also revealed that he had cheated during a training exercise designed to test his ability to work on GTTAW, the Moscow cable-tapping operation. During the exercise at the Farm, Howard was supposed to carry a weighted backpack while climbing into a manhole, a mock-up of the TAW site. Instead, he had stuffed his backpack with cardboard to make it easier to get into the hole. Howard failed the polygraph, and a second, a third, and a fourth, before the CIA’s Office of Security recommended a personnel evaluation board be convened to review his suitability for employment. After an extensive review by the panel of senior CIA officials, including Forden, Howard was fired in early May 1983.

On the day