How a U.S. Journalist Tracked Down ‘The Spy Who Got Away’

While following the bizarre and convoluted trail of Edward Lee Howard, David Wise sometimes felt as if he had ventured off the face of the Earth.

On Budapest’s Margit-sziget island in the Danube, Wise was struck by how surreal the scene was--Washington journalist in an unprecedented interview with a traitor, both sitting on a park bench while mothers walked by pushing kids in strollers.

Before that, there was the telephone conversation with Howard in Moscow. That was like “getting a call from the dark side of the moon,” Wise said, remembering his first talk with the man who had eluded the FBI and deceived the CIA. “It just felt so strange, you know, like somebody from outer space was calling.”

Restraint Tested

Excursions into hyperbole are rare for Wise, a veteran watcher of the U.S. intelligence community who has a matter-of-fact style in person and on paper. But Wise’s normal restraint clearly has been tested by the “sensational” and “incredible” story of Howard, the former Peace Corps volunteer who in 1985 became the first CIA employee to defect to the Soviet Union.

For more than 1 1/2 years Wise tracked Howard, pursuing the enigma from his roots in the Southwest to his selection as a CIA case officer for the agency’s most secret and sensitive operation--the U.S. spy network inside the Soviet Union.

The result of the stalk is “The Spy Who Got Away” (Random House), a book that is being highly praised for its revelations about the Howard scandal and that less than a week after publication showed up on one best-seller list.

In “The Spy Who Got Away” Wise gives his account of how Howard, an admitted drug user with a drinking problem, was hired by the CIA in 1981, selected for Moscow, then rejected for that post and fired by the agency in 1983, a chain of events that ignited Howard’s passion for revenge and treason and allowed him to reveal to the Soviets the CIA’s most treasured secret: details of its operations in the heart of Moscow.

Wise admits that he was hooked from the start.

“When I read that a former CIA officer trained for Moscow had escaped from a cordon of FBI men and disappeared into the desert near Santa Fe, it was obvious to me that the CIA had on its hands its first defector,” Wise said in an interview.

“I felt pretty certain he was going to show up in the Soviet Union, which he did. . . . He was perhaps the American Philby (Kim Philby was an infamous British double agent who died recently), and I wanted to go after it.”

But getting to the center of the story wasn’t easy.

First, Wise decided, he had to track down Howard’s wife, Mary, who disappeared after helping her husband escape, moving from Santa Fe to the Minneapolis area, where she was living in almost total seclusion.

Eventually, Wise got a post office box number and wrote to her, starting a dialogue by mail. Ultimately, Wise interviewed Mary Howard 17 times and persuaded her on one of her trips to Moscow to help arrange the interview last summer with Howard in Budapest.

It was quite a coup, getting that interview, Wise said, expressing a lingering sense of disbelief.

Thought Chances Were Slim

“I thought there would be no chance in the world, you know, a snowball in hell, that such a thing would happen,” he said. “And it never had in the whole history of the Cold War.”

Even though he figured the odds were against him, Wise was disappointed when Mary Howard didn’t call immediately after her return from Moscow. With what must have seemed admirable restraint, he waited days before phoning her.

“I said, ‘How did it go?’ ” Wise recalled. “She said, ‘Oh, it was great,’ and she sounded much happier. She’s still in love with him. ‘We went to the Bolshoi (ballet), we went to the Pushkin Museum, we stayed in a lovely dacha (country house).’ I said, ‘Yes, yes but what about my interview?’ And she said, ‘That’s fine, he’s going to call you early in June and he’ll meet you in Budapest.’ ”

About a month later, Howard did indeed reach Wise.

“Here’s this guy, the entire FBI had tried to track him down and failed,” Wise said. “He’s over there under the KGB’s protection. He’s disappeared. He hadn’t surfaced except once briefly on Soviet television. And there he is on the phone. . . . Within five days I was secretly on my way to Budapest with my son Jon.” (Howard surfaced again on Soviet television on June 17, an appearance that Wise contended was an attempt to divert attention from his book.)

After arriving in Eastern Europe, Wise soon discovered that he and Howard were in an environment where suspicion flourished.

“The first thing he (Howard) said to me was, ‘I was instructed by the KGB to meet you only in a couple of places so I can yell for help to passers-by in case you’re part of a CIA kidnap plot,’ ” Wise said.

Surreal Tale of New Life

“It’s difficult to tell you how surreal the whole thing was. . . . He starts telling me about his life in the Soviet Union, that he plays volleyball on the KGB team, that he’s under the protection of Vladimir Kryuchkov, the No. 2 man in the KGB. Here’s the man in charge of all foreign espionage for the KGB worldwide. He is Howard’s mentor. Howard thinks he’s the most wonderful fellow in the world--warm, generous. Good old Vladimir.”

(Howard’s warm feelings may have been stoked by the fact that the KGB paid him at least $160,000, by Wise’s accounting.)

For his own part, Wise worried that his precious notes from the six days of interviews would be stolen. So each night he entered what he had written on legal pads into a lap-top computer. Then he transferred the information stored in the computer to cassette tapes.

And finally his son Jon, who had come along to photograph Howard and his father, stored the tapes in cassette boxes that normally held the music of Bob Marley and Dizzy Gillespie.

This, however, was only part of the tangled web. An explanation of the murky workings of the CIA and the FBI, in charge of catching spies in the United States, also was crucial to telling how a walking time bomb like Howard could do the damage that he did.

Wise estimated that he interviewed more than 200 people for the book, many of them from the U.S. intelligence community, to piece together the bureaucratic bungling that allowed Howard’s 1985 escape.

Wise said he is appalled at the lack of cooperation between the FBI and CIA in the Howard case. He is most upset that the CIA took five days to tell the FBI that information from a Soviet defector implicated Howard.

He said he is also disturbed that the CIA apparently engaged in a cover-up about Howard from the moment it decided he was unfit for service in Moscow.

A Telling Example

Although he sought to write a book that eschews “the cliches of the Cold War,” Wise said he sees the story of Edward Lee Howard as a telling example of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry that has dominated world affairs for more than four decades.

“I don’t want to overstate this, but in a way Howard is almost symbolic of all of us because he is in sort of dramatic fashion caught between the United States and the Soviet Union,” Wise said. “We are all in a sense hostage to the tension between the superpowers.”