‘I Love My Country,’ Ex-CIA Agent Who Fled to Moscow Says

Former CIA agent Edward Lee Howard, who fled to the Soviet Union after he was accused of selling secrets to the Kremlin, claimed Sunday that he never harmed U.S. national security.

“I love my country,” Howard said in a filmed interview shown on national television after the main evening news program.

“I never caused any harm to America or harmed the security of my country,” he added. “I don’t equate being in Moscow with disloyalty.” The interviewer, Soviet journalist Genrikh Borovik, said Howard now lives in Moscow after he was granted political asylum by the Soviet government last Aug. 7.

They were shown walking in a wooded tract and later in a large, attractively furnished room, complete with a fireplace.

Howard, whose betrayal of CIA secrets reportedly dealt a crushing blow to U.S. intelligence networks in Moscow, disappeared from his New Mexico home a year ago. He is wanted by the FBI on espionage and fugitive charges.

According to Howard, he left the United States when FBI agents threatened to question his wife and his 2-year-old son if he did not cooperate with an investigation into his alleged dealings with the Soviet KGB. His wife and son remain in the United States.

With the aid of friends, he said, he went to Latin America where his ability to speak Spanish helped him avoid discovery.

Later, when he got tired of hiding, he said he asked the Soviet Union for asylum, and it agreed to help him and to provide protection.

“I came here secretly with the help of your people,” Howard told Borovik in the interview.

Speaking a few sentences in Russian, Howard said he wanted to thank the Soviet government and the Soviet people for the aid they provided to him in a difficult moment.

A big, heavy-set man with long dark hair and mustache, the 35-year-old Howard smiled a lot as he described his two-year stint with the CIA.

He said he was groomed to be a contact man with agents in Moscow while working under diplomatic cover in the U.S. Embassy.

But he flunked an “insulting” polygraph examination and left the intelligence agency, Howard said, without saying that he was fired, reportedly because of a drinking problem and mental instability.

Vitaly S. Yurchenko, the double defector who returned to the Soviet Union after cooperating with CIA officers, reportedly named Howard as a Soviet agent in 1985, and he was placed under close FBI surveillance.

“I thought the best thing to do was hide,” he said, adding that his CIA training helped him to escape despite the FBI observation.

The timing of Howard’s appearance spurred speculation that he might have something to say about Nicholas Daniloff, the American journalist accused by the KGB of being an American spy. But Howard never mentioned Daniloff during the 45-minute program.