CIA Defector’s Rewards by Soviets Told

Edward Lee Howard, the CIA agent who defected to the Soviet Union after the agency fired him, now lives in a Moscow apartment under the protection of the KGB’s No. 2 official and has been given a dacha in the outskirts of the city--a measure of the Soviets’ gratitude for his priceless information.

A newly published book on the Howard case, drawing on interviews with the defector and his wife, also disclosed that the Soviets may have paid him more than $160,000 for secrets about the CIA’s clandestine Moscow operations. Most of the money was deposited in a numbered Swiss bank account, but the FBI recovered $10,000 that Howard had buried in the New Mexico desert, about 20 minutes’ drive from his home. Howard defected in August, 1986.

Howard’s wife, Mary, also had been trained by the CIA to work with him as an American spy in the Soviet capital before their assignment was aborted when Howard admitted petty theft in a polygraph test. She has visited him three times in Moscow and Budapest, Hungary, according to the book, “The Spy Who Got Away.”

In Moscow, Howard’s welfare is personally supervised by Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, deputy chairman of the KGB in charge of all foreign operations, one of the country’s most powerful men.

Howard plays volleyball and tennis on KGB intramural teams, shops at special stores and worships at a Roman Catholic church behind KGB headquarters, the book says. When asked by author David Wise how he spent his days, Howard spoke vaguely of economic work, an assertion that Wise gives reason to doubt.

Despite the relatively comfortable life style, Howard is not without worries and unmet needs.

Abduction Fears

“I have to worry that the agency (CIA) might try to kidnap me,” he told Wise. “Every time I come to Budapest (he’s permitted to travel within the Soviet Union and to Hungary, where he met with Wise), the agency salivates. It wouldn’t take much--a hypodermic needle, throw me in the trunk of a car, and it’s only two hours to the border.”

Howard also told of longing for pizza and peanut butter, but he said he would not risk eating any that his wife mailed him for fear the CIA would poison it.

Wise, who has written extensively on espionage operations, quotes an intelligence official’s assessment that Howard’s work for the Soviets “wiped out (the CIA’s) Moscow station.”

In addition to betraying the CIA’s network of agents in Moscow, he gave away the CIA’s technical assets--communications intercepts and other high-technology operations for gathering intelligence inside the Soviet Union--according to the book.

Although the evidence appears to be overwhelming, Howard, in his six days of interviews with Wise, declined to take responsibility for the Soviets’ execution of Adolf G. Tolkachev, an electronics expert at a Soviet aviation institute in Moscow who had been passing the FBI secrets at least since the Jimmy Carter Administration. Howard knew of Tolkachev because, once in Moscow, he was to serve as the conduit for obtaining information from the electronics expert.

“Tolkachev was arrested two years after I left the CIA,” Howard told Wise. “Why didn’t they change the commo (communications) plan?”

The book tells how Vitaly Yurchenko, the Soviet KGB defector who disclosed Howard’s role as a double agent before redefecting to the Soviet Union, also saved the life of the top KGB official in London who had become a major asset for the British.

Yurchenko’s warning that Oleg A. Gordievski, chief of the KGB station in London in 1985, was in mortal danger came when Gordievski had been recalled to Moscow by suspicious superiors.

Acting on Yurchenko’s information, agents of MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, managed to contact Gordievski and rescue him, the book said.