November 1998-January 1999

By autumn, Vladimir Kryuchkov was growing anxious. Why had I not yet found a publisher for his book?

In fact, with the Bureau’s knowledge and authorization, I had genuinely submitted a manuscript entitled The Kryuchkov Konfessions to senior editors at several publishing houses in the United States and Britain. (The Bureau had no interest in whether or not Kryuchkov’s book was published in the United States; only that I should do whatever felt natural to perpetuate the ruse, mostly with regard to one day rendition Edward Lee Howard.)

The various editors unanimously assessed the former KGB chairman’s tome for what it was: dull and uninteresting.

To placate Kryuchkov and keep the ruse going, I created a dummy publishing contract through the aptly named Enigma Books, an imprint of Bartleby Press.

Kryuchkov’s modest advance on royalties came from FBI coffers.

On November 13th, Kryuchkov sealed the agreement with his signature.

Two months after that, I returned to Russia with my designated editor, Rick, a trusted publishing colleague I’d recruited as a witting FBI asset.

Rick had played roles in some of my private-sector intelligence operations; had proven invaluable as an insertion agent and second set of eyes.

“Don’t bring your address book to Moscow,” I preached to Rick what I myself practiced. “Get an index card, scramble whatever numbers you might possibly need on it, carry it in your wallet.”

I assumed, as a matter of caution, that the FSB—Russia’s security service—perused my possessions while I was away from my hotel room.

“And bring a copy of Publisher’s Weekly,” I added. “Maybe add a New York Review of Books.”

By this time, the FBI had become accustomed to my flying habits. Their accountants squawked about my Delta Business-elite fares and four-star hotel rooms.

But it was the price they had to pay for this stagehand production (stagehand being the Bureau’s jargon for sting-undercover operations).

So Rick and I flew from New York’s JFK to Moscow in style and toasted our partnership-in-espionage with champagne.

Many hours later, Moscow welcomed us.

Rick, who met Edward Howard for the first time in the arrival area, was struck by the deep sadness he detected in this traitor’s eyes.

Howard led us to his brand new Volvo sedan, dark blue with sleek black leather interior.

He’d finally got the new car promised him by Kryuchkov for publishing Safe House.

I was lagging, so I let Rick do most of the yakking, break him into the spy game, Moscow in January.

It was cold. Bright sunshine reflected off a fresh snowfall and bestowed upon the Russian capital a clean, fresh radiance.

Rick commented on the construction going on everywhere.

“That’s democracy for you,” said Howard, sardonically.

He dropped us at the Baltschug Kempinski. Rick and I checked in, and hoofed in slush to Red Square, stopping at GUM department store for a beer.

We spent the rest of the afternoon—and evening—goofing off, drinking bottles of SchneiderWeiss beer, first at the Beltschug Bar, then in the lobby, chuckling over whoever might be deployed to keep tabs on us.

Next morning, 9:55, Rick and I found Messers Kryuchkov and Prelin sitting stiffly on wing chairs in the lobby.

Hotel staff seemed to recognize the former KGB chairman. Thereafter, their manners toward Rick and myself were impeccable.

Kryuchkov wore the same navy-blue tie with white vertical stripe as last visit.

We elevated to my room. Lena Orlova (Howard’s assistant, our translator) arrived a few minutes later.

Rick set glasses before everyone and poured mineral water.

I provided a status report on the book: The (dummy) publisher was not happy, I said. We needed more—to use Igor Prelin’s phrase—silver bullets. And so I had a final volley of questions for Kryuchkov to answer.

The former KGB chairman stirred, smiled, and drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. He said he had a few comments to make: Why was it necessary to answer more questions? According to simple logic, he said, based on what I had cut and pasted from his original manuscript, then from the interview transcripts, and finally from the new material he had written… it all added up to 400 pages. Wasn’t that the precise number of pages I wanted his book to be? So why more questions?

I replied that a number of gaps remained. Plus we had a few new subject categories to consider for inclusion “to satisfy the publisher.”

Kryuchkov turned to Prelin, who had been scratching rashy patches of psoriasis or eczema on his arms. They conversed in Russian; Lena Orlova did not translate—her loyalty, transparent.

Kryuchkov requested that he and his stooge leave the room to continue their discussion.

When the Russians returned ten minutes later and re-rumped their rears, Kryuchkov thanked me politely for my hard work, but declined to answer any further questions.

Prelin argued with him. Kryuchkov acquiesced.

“Okay, ask a question,” Prelin instructed.

“In our last interview,” I said, “you referred to the First Directorate as the White Bone. Why White Bone?”

“We were called White Bone by other directorates of the KGB,” replied Kryuchkov.

“What does it mean?”

“It is Russian for somebody of noble origins,” said Kryuchkov. He looked at Prelin, snapped a few words of Russian, and rose, ready to leave.

What should have been The Kryuchkov Konfessions was now The Kryuchkov Kop-out.

I gifted the old goat with bags of Tootsie Roll Pops and Hershey’s Kisses for his grandchildren. It sweetened him up a little, but not much.

We descended to the lobby. While Prelin searched for Kryuchkov’s car and driver, I made small talk about U.S. politics with the former KGB chairman. He expressed a fondness for Colin Powell, whom, he said, he once met. But, he added, “a black man could never be elected President of the United States.”

Prelin returned. The car was ready. Kryuchkov got up from his chair and departed.

Prelin remained behind. He, Orlova, Rick, and I returned to my room.

“That went well,” I muttered.

My mind, however, was already entertaining the upside: Kryuchkov had thrown a tantrum and failed to cooperate after I’d flown all the way to Moscow.

Now the dummy publisher could bail from publishing his dull, dogmatic book without offending anyone except Kryuchkov himself, who’d already been sucked for all his worth. Howard and Prelin would understand.

Prelin dismissed his boss’s behavior with a backhand wave, said something derogatory about “old people,” and announced: “I will answer your questions.”

His implication: I could use Prelin’s words in the former KGB chairman’s book as Kryuchkov’s own.

I shrugged, why not. Let’s grill this scaly weasel.

“There is no such thing as ugly women,” Prelin began. “Sometimes, there is not enough vodka.” He laughed hard, with a pretentious self-confidence betrayed by the psoriasis or eczema that had broken out on his face, neck, knuckles, and arms. Then he opened himself up to interrogation.

I began by reminding Prelin about the CIA officer he supposedly recruited and handled before the officer’s untimely demise in Beirut.

Prelin refused to identify this alleged spy by name, saying only that he had been married, divorced, no children, parents deceased. He suggested I read a novel he’d published, which he said was thinly veiled fiction of that case.

“Intelligence services worldwide study my novels,” said Prelin.

In his dreams.

(Not expecting the FBI to do anything about it—and aware that Prelin may have been providing disinformation—I narrowed the list of CIA officers killed in the 1983 Beirut bombing to one suspect who potentially fit the profile as described. Without more evidence, it would be unfair to name that person.)

“Bill Clinton visited Russia in 1970,” I said. “Have you ever seen his KGB file?”

(President Clinton was not on the FBI’s shopping list; this was my own curiosity.)

“I was offered $100,000 by American television for information on Clinton’s visit to Moscow. But we wanted Clinton to become the president in 1992, because he was better than the other candidate [Bush, senior] from the Russian point of view.”

“You mean, what you knew about Clinton might have led to his defeat if publicly known?”

“Yes,” said Prelin. “That’s why we did not give this information.”

“A girlfriend?”

“There were some things,” said Prelin. “I wouldn’t respect him if he did not have affairs with Russian girls.”

“So, just sexual adventures?”

“You should have come to Moscow when you were 22 or 23 and KGB was in good shape. You’d be sitting with Ames, in same prison maybe. I can only tell you that our information [on Clinton] could have influenced the election.”

“Would it be enough to get him into trouble today?”

“Yeah, it could,” said Prelin. “But we’re not interested in anything bad happening to Clinton. With his problems now [Monica Lewinsky, impeachment], the combination would finish him.”

“What about Princess Diana?” I asked. “An accident?”

(Again, my own curiosity about the KGB perspective on Diana’s tragic death.)

“Ha! It’s a great motive for an assassination, for the Royal Family to have somebody in the family who has an Egyptian husband, which means the young princes would have brothers and sisters of different origins. Diana was going to become a Moslem. So she’d have Moslem children. That doesn’t strengthen the lot of the British Monarchy. It is strong point against. So if you examine as Sherlock Holmes taught us, ask yourself a question: Who gains? You get the answer: Royal Family.”

“Is British Intelligence capable of doing this kind of thing?”

“Ha! Better than any intelligence service in the world. I consider the British the most cruel of the white population. They are the most cruel nation.”

“With your understanding of intelligence,” I said, “is this something British Intelligence would take upon itself to execute, or would they require instruction from the Royal Family?”

“You think during the Stalin era we shot anybody without instructions? You think that Martin Luther King or Kennedy was assassinated without instructions from a higher echelon?”

“What higher echelon?”

“[Lyndon] Johnson knew about it.”

“Is that what the KGB believes?”

“Our organization thinks it was a plot,” said Prelin.

“You are familiar with the circumstances of Princess Diana’s accident. How could that have been a staged assassination?”

“Why not?” said Prelin. “A few days ago the same thing was tried with a Russian provincial governor. He was driving on a two-lane highway, they detonated a 50-gram explosive. It’s nothing to damage a car, just a simple explosive. They were counting on a psychological effect. The whole idea is to scare the driver.”

“Where would the explosive be?”

“In our case, the thing went off too early,” said Prelin. “The driver got scared, but he had time to react. Now, about Diana. As far as I know, the experts were considering this. Some people were blaming the paparazzi, that somebody was taking pictures in front of the car with a flash. No. I can put something on the windshield of your car that will have the same effect. It will flash in an instant, and when the car is moving, when it’s dark in the tunnel, such a flash will make you blind.”

“What kind of flash?” I asked.

“Some chemicals, manganese and selenium. It will not burn, just a bright light. The thing is so weak, no traces. It would be a tiny thing. Magnetic. Where the wipers are. At the right place, by remote control—flash!”

“Has British Intelligence used this method before?”

“Ha! They’ve done things better than this. The British service were intensely trying to recruit a Soviet scientist. It was 1976 or ‘77, he went to London on a delegation, they tried to recruit him. He was there a month. They started following him. He went to our embassy, reported it, and they told him to go to Berne, in Switzerland. The British followed him there, tried to recruit him again in his hotel room. They gave him a drug, but they gave him too much and he died. And they just threw him out of the window. The Swiss gave the body back. We examined it. We found traces of the drug, proved he was dead before he went out the window. So we know very well about the British.”

Here was the old-guard KGB’s (big) mouthpiece, telling me in the space of 15 minutes that 1) the KGB had a file on Clinton that could have prevented his election and re-election, 2) Lyndon Johnson conspired to assassinate President John F. Kennedy, and 3) British Intelligence murdered Princess Diana on instructions from the British Monarchy.

A conspiracy theorist’s dream!

At 6 p.m., Howard arrived at the Baltschug Kempinski with his new girlfriend, Mila, to take Rick and me out for a “real” Russian dinner.

Mila, from the Ukraine, was a blonde knockout. Young, curvy, vivacious. The kind of trophy wife rich cretins like to show off in Monte Carlo. Mila apologized, in excellent English, for wearing sunglasses, meant to hide a bad case of conjunctivitis. Or recent plastic surgery. Or a black eye.

The two had met, said Howard, on March 8th (International Women’s Day in Russia) 1997, at a party. Mila was a divorcee with a 22 month-old son.

Howard found a space outside Le Romanoff. (You wouldn’t call a decent restaurant Le Stalin or Le Khrushchev.)

Rick focused on Mila; I, on Howard, as we had prearranged.

Howard requested that I not mention Mila to Lena Orlova; he was juggling both women.

By chance, said Howard, he had bumped into a woman from the U.S. Agency for International Development whom he’d known in the Peace Corps many years earlier. She met Howard a second time and told him that she’d had to report their encounter to the U.S. Embassy. As a result, the embassy’s legat (FBI representative) had made Howard a new offer: Come home, admit espionage, and spend two years at a minimum-security prison.

“Sounds like a fair deal to me, Ed,” I said. “Why not go for it?”

“First off,” said Howard, “who knows what could happen to me in prison? And after I got out, I’d probably wind up back in Moscow because my experience and contacts are here. So why bother?” He paused. “Maybe in a couple years they’ll offer me a better deal.”

I asked him if he still wanted to sneak back into the United States for a visit.

Howard puffed on a Salem, was back to chain-smoking, and smiled. “Yeah, I’d like to take a Greyhound bus tour and see the Grand Canyon. But I’ll have to be careful. One of my KGB contacts told me, ‘They [the FBI] have given up on you. They’ll only get you if you show up on U.S. territory.’”

As far as I knew—and I knew a lot—Howard’s KGB contact had it right.

From where had the Russians gotten such good intelligence?

(The ongoing spy hunt back in Washington had focused, erroneously, on a CIA officer named Brian Kelley.)

As we ate our meals, a trio of Russian musicians performed traditional tunes, including one by Pushkin.

Howard was so cheap, he wouldn’t even order a second bottle of wine, so I took control of ordering—and the tab. This cheered him significantly, and he opened up with an interesting tidbit on George Blake: The British traitor had finally been venturing out of Russia for vacations abroad. Blake marveled at the ease with which Howard traveled so freely around Europe. So last summer he’d taken his wife on a Mediterranean cruise.

I asked Howard about his business.

“My KGB contacts liked to point me out as a success story,” said Howard. “Doing well, making money.”

But he was not as buoyant as the summer before. The Russian stock market had petered out, was losing money, not making any. And Howard, with his accountant mentality, defined himself by financial worth and fiscal growth.

His enthusiasm for meeting new clients had waned in this declining market, so I needed a new lure.

Since Howard was no longer flush with cash, he would probably be willing to meet a movie producer to discuss a hefty sum for film rights to his book Safe House—wouldn’t he?

“I’m there,” said Howard. And speaking of books, his old KGB handler Igor Batamirov was thinking about writing one.

Next day, Rick set off with Igor Prelin to meet a couple of old-fogy generals about their own scribing for publication.

He returned to the hotel and joined me for a six p.m. meeting with Igor Batamirov, as arranged by Howard, who’d cautioned, “Don’t tell Prelin about this. He wants a piece of everything.”

Batamirov cut a formidable presence in sport coat, V-neck sweater, slacks, and English driver’s cap, overcoat, and woolen scarf. His large, doughy face sat heavily upon a wide-girth double chin.

Batamirov wore a six-piece gold puzzle ring he had acquired in Kuwait. When I mentioned I’d once bought a similar ring—an eight-piece—at the souk in Beirut, Batamirov smiled. His best years, the early 1970s, he said, had been spent in Beirut.

This former counterintelligence chief, who had run both Howard and Ames, exuded a low-key self-confidence. He was, he knew, a master-of-the-kingdom. Unlike Prelin, he had no need to toot his own horn.

Batamirov gazed into space as he spoke decent English, lapsing into quiet, reflective moments that added to his authoritative air. He told me he retired from active service in 1994, after five years as counterintelligence chief. Soon after, he divorced his wife of many years and married a woman with whom, he said, he’d enjoyed an intimate relationship for 22 years.

“It was always my plan to marry this woman,” said Batamirov. “But two things had to happen. One, my children had to grow up. And two, I had to retire. Otherwise it would have ruined my career.”

Batamirov knew I’d come to town to see his former boss. He’d read Kryuchkov’s book, as published in Russia, and found it “very dull.”

As for his own book, Batamirov told me of his fascination for what he called “the phenomenon and psychology of betrayal.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Maybe even a book unto itself.”

Batamirov responded to my questions in a deliberate, thoughtful manner, avoiding eye contact until strategic moments, when he would use such contact to conclude an important point or assess its impact on his listener.

I asked about Ames. Batamirov confirmed that he had been Ames’s handler.

I asked about Yurchenko, and told him that Kryuchkov seemed to believe Yurchenko’s version of his defection.

“Yurchenko is a liar,” said Batamirov. “And Kryuchkov is a fool.”

I coached Batamirov on the basic elements of a book proposal. He listened carefully, then confirmed his commitment to visit the United States and meet prospective publishers.

I knew the FBI was going to love this one.

Ed Howard drove Rick and me to the airport next day.

We agreed to meet in Havana, where Howard promised to introduce me to his Cuban intelligence pals.

Rick and I were the only passengers flying Business Elite back to New York, a whole cabin to ourselves.

Hearing the aircraft door clunk shut was, for me, a golden moment.

June 1997

KGB Colonel Igor Prelin was waiting in the lobby of my Moscow hotel at 6 p.m. on the dot.

He relieved me of a bottle of Ridge Geyserville zinfandel I’d brought along as a gift for former KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov.

“I give him for you,” said Prelin.

Prelin drove a BMW. He told me he was born in Siberia, came to Moscow in 1966 for Intelligence School. He worked five years in counterintelligence before joining the KGB’s First Directorate, serving tours in Angola, Mozambique, and Senegal.

(On my return to Washington, my report to the FBI included Prelin’s comment about him running a CIA officer for eight years, which he claimed was one of the eight CIA officers who were killed in the Beirut embassy bombing. I suggested the Bureau determine whom amongst the deceased CIA officers had previously served in Angola, Mozambique, or Senegal, and where precisely they had been serving in the mid-1970s. I doubt this information went any further than my report.)

Prelin prattled on with pompous self-importance until we arrived at Edward Howard’s apartment, though this arrangement was without logic, for Lena Orlova drove with Howard in his car and I got stuck with Prelin for company, at his insistence.

When we reached Kryuchkov’s apartment building, Prelin instructed me to join Howard in his car. He went up to fetch the boss.

Five minutes later, a chauffeur-driven Zhiguili pulled out with Kryuchkov and Prelin in the backseat. We would not be dining in Uncle Vlad’s apartment, as Howard had thought.

“Kryuchkov has a car and driver again,” Howard explained. “The Duma Committee on Security, run by the Communists, made Kryuchkov a consultant, and that qualifies him for a driver.”

“Prelin’s a piece of work,” I said.

Howard cursed under his breath. “These First Directorate colonels all think they’re hot shit. They all drive BMWs.”

We followed the Zhiguili to Taganka, a Moscow suburb and parked in the lot of a restaurant called Fairy Tale.

Inside, the owners greeted Kryuchkov with great warmth. They had closed the larger room of their restaurant to all but our party.

“This is K’s favorite restaurant,” Howard whispered to me.

Inside a dark dining room, a long table was spread banquet-style with three kinds of smoked Baltic fish and other appetizers.

Howard acted very blasé about the whole affair. He could have cared less being present, had joined us only at Kryuchkov’s insistence.

(An irony of post-usefulness syndrome, common to defectors once fully debriefed: Now that Howard had become a hotshot stock analyst and was surfing the wave of new Russian capitalism, he appeared to have no further use for them.)

Although Howard did not seek the company of these old-guard KGB officers, he remained charmed by Kryuchkov’s obvious affection toward him.

Kryuchkov gifted me with the two-volume hardcover of his autobiography, as published in Russia. He autographed it with this handwritten message in Cyrillic.

My new sounder of friends and I ate by candlelight, and drank “Stalin’s favorite wine” (according to Kryuchkov), a Georgian rouge called Kindzmarauli.

Talk of Joseph Stalin brought cheer to the former KGB chairman. He recalled a special moment, in 1953, when he realized he stood only a hundred feet from the tyrannical dictator.

“It was the happiest day of my life,” said Kryuchkov, a tear welling behind thick glasses.

It pleased the former KGB chairman to report to me that a Stalin revival was underway in Moscow. Whenever Stalin’s name was invoked at the ballet or the theater, said Kryuchkov, people broke into applause.

In contrast to his adoration for Stalin, Kryuchkov told me he despised Nikita Khrushchev.

But, he added, “Khrushchev, to his credit, never would have tolerated Gorbachev. When I go out, I have no bodyguards. I walk the streets alone. If people come up to me, they are kind and sympathetic. But Gorbachev dares not step one foot out of his home without five bodyguards. The people taunt him. They throw tomatoes at him.”

We agreed on a title for Kryuchkov’s memoir. Spy Lord: Secrets of the KGB Chairman.

“What will Washington think,” Prelin said to me, “when the Soviet Union re-emerges?”

“Is this something you expect to achieve militarily?” I asked.

“No,” Kryuchkov answered. “It’s what the people want.”

“So,” I asked, “you’re going to reunite through public referendum?”

“Yes,” Prelin and Kryuchkov replied in unison.

“Everyone seems to be in favor of big nation-states,” I said, “like a unified Europe. But just the same, I don’t think I’d use the word Soviet if I were you. Nor Union for that matter.” My tongue was planted firmly in cheek. “Maybe you should call yourselves the Democratic States of Eurasia?”

Prelin concurred. I struggled to keep a straight face.

“The problem,” said Kryuchkov, “is that your country interferes with the popular vote.”

“Ah,” I said.

“It’s not right for your country to do this,” added Prelin.

“Okay, here’s what you do,” I said. “We have secession groups in Texas and California. Alaska has a whole political party devoted to breaking from the federal union. You should retaliate and give these groups your support.”

“Ah, yes!” Prelin lurched forward. “We tell Vladimir Alexandrovitch [Kryuchkov] to do this [when he was KGB chairman]! But he does not listen!”

And I’m sitting there thinking, What am I doing in this asylum?

Kryuchkov launched another complaint against the United States. “You have too many laws,” he said. “So you’re not free. We did not repress people with laws. So we had real freedom.”

I’d come through the looking glass and that’s where I’d landed, at the mad KGB chairman’s dinner party, as painted by Salvador Dali.

Then Prelin jumped into his greatest gripe of all: The American IRS was now teaching the Russian government how to collect taxes. Prelin complained that he had to pay “104 percent tax” on one of his projects.

I said I did not understand how this could be possible. “You’d lose money.”

“Yaa.” Prelin shrugged to make his point. “But I make special arrangements, so it turns out okay.”

Thankfully, the conversation reverted to books.

I explained that the spy genre was not doing well. “Nobody cares,” I said. “Everybody in the States says the Cold War is over.”

Prelin shook his head sadly. “Yaa, that’s what they say here, too.”

The main course, small dumplings with meat (of what origin, I dared not ask), arrived. Then dinner ended abruptly without offer of dessert or coffee.

Prelin had still not given Kryuchkov my gift, the bottle of wine. I asked him about it.

“I take care of it,” he replied. “KGB honor.”

Which meant, I suppose, Kryuchkov never got his bottle.

I mentioned this to Howard on the drive back to my hotel.

Howard shook his head; it was obvious he had no time for Prelin.

“Prelin’s like a student council president,” said Howard, shaking his head in disgust. “Plays his role as head of the former KGB officers association to the hilt. He crashed my last birthday party.”

Birthdays in Moscow had always been a bone of contention with Howard.

“It’s traditional that all your Russian friends drop by,” he told me. “You’re supposed to give them food and vodka.”

With his tightwad character, this wasn’t exactly Howard’s idea of a good time.

June 1997

Edward Lee Howard arrived punctually at the Baltschug-Kempinski Hotel in Moscow with his special guests.

I descended to the lobby to greet them, and went to the privacy of my room.

Vladimir Kryuchkov had the cherubic face of a kindly uncle.

You would never know, looking at him, that he had been one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union.

The 74-year-old former KGB chairman dressed like a Communist Party apparatchik in a charcoal wool suit, white shirt, navy-blue tie with a white vertical stripe, and a woolen sweater-vest.

His round, apple-cheeked face was dominated by large spectacles with heavy amber-colored frames. A wisp of gray hair atop his bald pate stood on end as if wanting to take flight.

It was hard to believe that this short, smiling man had personally ordered the executions of spies given up by CIA traitor Aldrich Ames.

As KGB Chairman, he would visit their cells the night before execution and ask, “Are you comfortable?”

Kryuchkov’s sidekick, Colonel Igor Prelin, was dressed (comically, I thought) in black slacks, black silk shirt, black striped tie, and burgundy shoes. His hair was slicked hair, heavy on gel, or grease, and he wore a trim gray beard.

Al Capone meets Red Mafia.

Lena Orlova was Howard’s assistant, a KGB agent who had been married to Glenn Michael Souther, an American defector from the U.S. Navy who committed suicide in Moscow at age 32 in 1989.

Orlova now operated as Howard’s fallback date though her real job was keeping tabs on him.

Plain with ivory skin and observant eyes, the odd thing about Orlova was her bobbing Adam’s apple. (Females normally do not have them.)

I opened the meeting and explained my position on Kryuchkov’s book:

It would have to be a memoir of his intelligence career, not a full-fledged autobiography. The American reading public could not sit through two long volumes, as just published in Russia.

It needed jazzing up, I added, with lots of color.

But it also needed major revelations. Things nobody had ever known before. The sort of thing they called “Gee whiz moments” at the National Enquirer under its founder, Generoso Pope.

“Ah,” said Prelin. “Silver bullets.”

“That’s right,” I said. “We need a lot of silver bullets.”

We needed, I said solemnly, to solve some of the great spy mysteries of the twentieth century.

Vladimir Kryuchkov had begun his government career as a diplomat. Posted in Hungary during that nation’s repressed rebellion in 1956, he caught the eye of Ambassador Yuri Andropov, a rising star who would, in time, become Chairman of the KGB—and eventually succeed Leonid Brezhnev as the Soviet Union’s top banana. Andropov became Kryuchkov’s mentor, first transferring him from the foreign ministry to the KGB, then nurturing Kryuchkov’s career to the top.

In all, Kryuchkov spent 24 years in high positions at the KGB, including chief of the First Directorate, a spymaster responsible for Soviet espionage and covert operations worldwide.

In 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev crowned Kryuchkov chairman of the KGB.

And in August 1991, Kryuchkov showed his appreciation by conspiring to unseat Gorbachev in a failed putsch.

I asked permission to tape-record our session; Kryuchkov agreed, and we began.

“I trusted Gorbachev,” said Kryuchkov. “He swore that he would not permit disintegration of the Soviet Union.”

Now Kryuchkov had only profound scorn for his former boss. “The date of the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he told me,” can be precisely marked to the day Gorbachev took power in 1985.”

Kryuchkov was convinced (a “silver bullet,” Prelin interrupted) that Alexandre Yakovlev, one of Gorby’s closet advisers, worked secretly for the CIA; that Yakovlev had been recruited in 1959 while an exchange student at Columbia University in New York City.

“I brought this to Gorbachev’s attention,” said Kryuchkov. “I suggested that we commence an official investigation. What did the President of the USSR do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

With hindsight, Kryuchkov now questioned Gorbachev’s allegiance to the Motherland.

“Gorbachev was praised by American and German leaders. He liked everybody in the West,” said Kryuchkov, before posing, “So here is the question: Did Gorbachev work for the East or West?”

Kryuchkov said that the CIA’s strategy of destabilizing the Soviet Union from within is what led to its collapse.

“The KGB received trustworthy information on this point,” said Kryuchkov. “We knew that they had created a network of influence in Soviet society, a long-term program that influenced our intelligentsia and demoralized our military. We must pay tribute to Western strategists,” he added with sarcasm. “They did not make a mistake backing Gorbachev.”

“How do you know these things?” I asked.

I knew I was talking to the former KGB chairman, who should know these things.

But Maurice Buckmaster, chief of Britain’s Special Operations Executive during World War II, taught me always to play the skeptic when dialoging with sources.

“It all started with Philby,” replied Kryuchkov.

That would be Kim Philby, the infamous British MI6 operative who spied for the Russians over two decades and did untold damage to the West.

“The materials passed us by Philby were of extreme tactical and strategic importance,” Kryuchkov added.

“Do you ever wonder if Philby wasn’t a triple agent?” I posed.

“When Philby first arrived in Moscow, we watched his apartment, monitored his telephone conversations, and opened his mail,” Kryuchkov admitted. “He did not understand everything about our Soviet reality, and many things upset him, particularly our way of life. But during his last ten years, Philby enjoyed the unlimited confidence of his Soviet friends, and there was nothing about his behavior to doubt his loyalty to communism and the Soviet Union.”

But it was another Western spy that Kryuchkov ranked “one of our most brilliant achievements”:

Aldrich Ames, a CIA official who reported to his masters in Moscow for almost ten years.

“Until Ames joined our side in the mid-1980s,” said Kryuchkov, “we had very limited success in the hunt for foreign penetrations in our service.” Kryuchkov took no responsibility for Ames’s arrest. “During my chairmanship, Ames’s security was of paramount importance.”

Other former KGB officials believe Kryuchkov’s treatment of those fingered by Ames—recall from foreign posts, swift arrest, execution—convinced the FBI and CIA to launch a spy hunt.

On the subject of famous spy cases, I asked the former KGB chairman about Vitaly Yurchenko, the KGB officer who defected to the United States from Italy in 1985, and then dramatically re-defected to the Soviet Union.

It was Yurchenko who gave up Robert to CIA debriefers—a contingent led by, of all people, Aldrich Ames! That codename and a description of Robert’s circumstances traced immediately to Edward Lee Howard in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“During a walk in Rome,” said Kryuchkov, “Yurchenko suddenly felt sick. He sat down for a rest and passed out. When he regained consciousness, Yurchenko saw strangers bending over him. Everything else was a fog: an airplane, an isolated house, the United States.”

The real fog, in this instance, was Kryuchkov-created: a tale fabricated for internal Soviet consumption.

“Nobody believes that,” I said, shaking my head.

“No?” said Kryuchkov. “Then how about this: Yurchenko knew what he was doing. It was a self-appointed mission to embarrass the CIA.”

“Better,” I said. “But I’ve been hoping your book would be truthful.”

As Prelin translated, Kryuchkov stiffened. Even after many months in the can, the former KGB chairman was still accustomed to sycophants who said yaa, not nyet-nyuk.

We moved onto the case of Nicholas Shadrin, a Soviet naval commander who defected to Sweden in 1959 and went to work for the CIA.

In 1975, Shadrin disappeared while on a trip to Austria.

“Yes, we did kidnap Shadrin,” Kryuchkov conceded. “He had violated his oath, defected to the West, and worked against the USSR. For this crime, he was tried in absentia, convicted, and sentenced to be shot. In the early 1970s, our service located Shadrin in Washington and established contact with him. He agreed to make amends and work for Soviet intelligence. I believed he was truly remorseful and could be useful to us. But he became too enthusiastic, and we found his behavior suspicious.

“Then we received reliable information that the Americans were behind this game. So we decided to lure this traitor out and bring him home. Oleg Kalugin, a First Directorate colonel, was put in charge of the operation. In meetings, we discussed how to deal with Shadrin’s resistance and transport him from Vienna to Prague. We decided to use chloroform. But Kalugin had his own agenda. The result was a fiasco. Drugged unconscious, Shadrin was pulled a thousand yards in the snow at the Austrian-Czech border, then left to lay in the icy cold for 20 minutes because the car that was supposed to carry him got stuck in the snow. Shadrin died.

“My deputy flew to Prague to assess the failure of this operation. He reported that our receiving team was upset, all except for Kalugin, who appeared satisfied by the outcome. An autopsy determined that Shadrin had liver cancer at an advanced stage, so he would not have lived more than six months anyway.”

During a short break, Igor Prelin engaged me in conversation. He told me he had written a novel, published in Russia, based on a true story, “about a CIA officer I ran for eight years. He died tragically in Lebanon.”

“When?” I asked.

“January 1983, the embassy bombing.”

I was surprised by the casualness with which Prelin laid such a bombshell on me. Perhaps he wanted to track where it might travel.

I asked Prelin if Kryuchkov had been followed to my hotel.

“They’ve been called off for one day.” Prelin winked. “We have professionals in charge again.”

Prelin told me that he represented 3,600 retired KGB officers.

“Who has better counterintelligence?” I asked him. “Russians or Americans.”

“We do,” replied Prelin. “America only catches agents through betrayal. We catch them through hard work.”

Stopping once again only for room service sandwiches, coffee and tea, my session with Kryuchkov went on till four p.m.

I filled three ninety-minute cassette tapes.

We covered Kryuchkov’s leading role in the attempted putsch to unseat Gorbachev, for which the former KGB chairman went to prison.

“How did you feel to be so powerful one day, and in prison the next?” I asked.

“It is like existing in another dimension,” replied Kryuchkov. “A nightmarish dream. Except you don’t wake up. The first night, the first few days, I wasn’t feeling anything. Different emotions were fighting within me. I felt weightless, had no physical feeling within myself. I was not thinking personally. I tell you, I thought very little about my family, my wife, and children and grandchildren. My main concern was the state problem. I was a Komsomol member at 14, a Party member at 18, so I was brought up in an atmosphere of heroic ideas.

“When I entered the cell, other prisoners there for other things were shocked. It was five in the morning. They gave me hot tea and let me go to bed. At six when they turned on the lights, nobody woke me up, so I had a chance to sleep. The first thing I did when I woke up was my morning exercises. It’s been a habit for 60 years now. I exercise for one hour. The guards, other prisoners, looked at me with shocked eyes. I had decided to do my normal thing.”

“I understand you are now under surveillance,” I said. “How does it feel to be subjected to the kind of treatment you once supervised yourself?”

“I’d be offended if they were not watching me,” snapped Kryuchkov.

“I have to ask you about [Aldrich] Ames,” I said.

“Have you read what I wrote?”

“Yep. And I need more. So far, five books have been written about Ames. You, the former KGB chairman, must address it in depth for anyone in the West to take your book seriously.”

Kryuchkov obfuscated with vague generalities.

I attempted specificity, broaching something Edward Howard had laid on me a few years earlier. “Could the KGB have rescued Ames?”

“This problem started when I was already out of the business,” replied Kryuchkov tersely. “This is a game, a war, without any rules.”

I was getting nowhere fast.

Another stab: “Why did you act so quickly to arrest and execute spies identified by Ames when this would probably arouse suspicion that someone in the CIA was tipping you off?”

Igor Prelin jumped into the fray, changing the subject.

“Why only Ames?” Prelin protested. “Some agents were identified without his help. We had to act, big secrets from the KGB and the Ministry of Defense were being given out. This was a danger and threat to our people.”

“Who was the worst CIA director?” I asked.

“The worst for us?” said Kryuchkov. “[William] Casey was the worst for us.”

“And the best, for you?”

“[Stansfield] Turner.”

“What kind of contact did you have with the CIA?”

“The first contact between representatives of Soviet and U.S. intelligence took place in December 1987, between me and Robert Gates, who was deputy director of the CIA,” said Kryuchkov. “We met in Washington, an unofficial meeting in a small restaurant. Gates knew which brand of whiskey I drink, Chivas Regal. We spoke in generalities about Soviet-American relations.

“A couple of years later, Gates visited Moscow, and we had a meeting at a KGB guesthouse in Kolpachny Pereulok. Gates asked me if I wish to know the CIA’s view of what would happen to the Soviet Union in the year 2000. I said yes. In a few carefully chosen words, Gates said he doubted the Soviet Union would still exist. He asked if I would like to see the CIA’s analytical report on the future of my country. I said I would be grateful to accept such material. And though we later reminded Gates about his offer, we never did receive the CIA report.

“I thought about Gates’s tragic forecast. And then, with some mortification, I watched it happen ten years ahead of schedule.”

“Ah,” said Prelin. “A silver bullet.”

“Let’s shoot for another silver bullet,” I said. “Oleg Kalugin has written that John Cairncross is not the fifth man in Britain’s Cambridge spy ring. If not Cairncross, who was it?”

Kryuchkov snarled at the mention of Kalugin’s name.

Prelin got excited. “Why not ask for the sixth and seventh? There were lots of agents in Britain. Somebody invented this five.”

“Okay, so who were the sixth and seventh?” I asked.

“Aha!” said Prelin.

“Okay, how about this: Why wasn’t the KGB able to prevent Gorbachev from giving up Eastern Europe?” (Another question from the Bureau’s shopping list.)

“We have instilled a feeling among KGB officers that they should respect the laws,” said Kryuchkov. “We were very upset with Gorbachev’s actions already, but it was not of an organized character. I don’t write this in my book, but I am telling you now: I was offered to take all the power into my hands as the KGB chairman. I refused this, though it was possible, because it would have been a real coup.”

“What do you want your epitaph to say?” I asked.

“Just my name, date of birth, date of death.”

This was the essence of Kryuchkov: Except to students of Sovietology and espionage, his conversation and ideas were as tedious as his pen.

As forecasted by Howard, Kryuchkov invited me to be his guest for dinner. Prelin, Orlova, and the former KGB chairman discussed logistics.

Prelin turned my way. “I come here for you at six.” He winked. “The KGB will take care of you.”

June 1997

I was amused the moment I began reading Vladimir Kryuchkov’s “chapter summary” for a book he wanted to title “A Life Devoted to the Cause.”

“I was in Stalingrad when the Great Patriotic War broke out in 1941,” Kryuchkov had written. “It was a hot summer day, June 22nd, and my dream had come true: My parents went to town to buy me a bicycle. As they prepared to pay for it, loudspeakers announced the star of war. I did not get the bicycle.”

It spoke volumes to me about this man; about his whole life: He didn’t get the bicycle.

On page 84, Kryuchkov addressed the assistance CIA turncoat Edward Lee Howard had given the KGB:

“With Howard’s help we were able to cut off channels through which information vital to the security of the USSR was being leaked.”

The KGB’s own former chairman admitting that which Howard had always denied and could be used as testimony against him!

So now I was managing two books side-by-side:

Howard’s Spy’s Guide and Kryuchkov’s memoirs, for which Howard was the designated point-man.

For more efficient commo with Howard, the FBI’s computer whiz, Tom M, had set me up with the newest Compaq PC and internet capability for exchanging email with Howard, and for receiving material from him.

And the Bureau’s Russian translators had gone to work on Kryuchkov’s manuscript.

I’d zapped Howard numerous emails for conveyance to Kryuchkov in which I urged the former KGB chairman to spice up his prose with revelations and anecdotes.

Kryuchkov promised to write material that did not appear in the Russian version of his book.

One year later, I was still waiting.

But it finally materialized, in January 1997.

Which meant time had ripened for a face-to-face encounter with Kryuchkov—in Moscow.

Which meant risking my freedom in service to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to anyone (least of all the Bureau, in denial about such things), a senior FBI counterintelligence official at headquarters was sending everything he could get his hands on to Moscow.

In Russia, the going rate in the can for espionage is 20 years.

But operating undercover is akin to drinking a dopamine-oxytocin-adrenaline cocktail.

The idea was to pump the former KGB chairman with questions about spy riddles the FBI hoped to solve.

I scheduled my trip for mid-June 1997, two years since I had last seen Ed Howard, and almost three years since I’d visited the Russian capital to first meet Howard.

FBI Russia specialists supplied me with a shopping list, i.e., subjects I would broach, ostensibly to “improve” Kryuchkov’s dead horse of a book; questions designed to shed light on past spy cases and other unresolved issues.

For his part, Special Agent John H wanted an update on Howard’s travels and state of mind.

As my Swissair jet neared Sheremtevo Airport, the clouds thickened, then darkened, and what had been a smooth cruise now became rocky and uncertain. I listened to the soundtrack of Russia House on my Walkman as we bumped clouds into a final approach.

This time Customs was a breeze, but no Ed Howard waiting in Arrivals.

A dozen-plus cab drivers descended upon me, circling over and over again like sharks sniffing prey. (Choose the wrong driver and you’d end up mugged or dead.) I found a wall for my back in the dark, cavernous terminal.

Howard finally appeared, cursing traffic.

He took my bag and led me to his battered old blue Volvo; its odometer now clocked 106,670 miles.

Dressed in a suit and tie, Howard had gained another ten pounds since we last met.

As we drove, he ran through logistics:

Kryuchkov would arrive at my hotel at nine o’clock next morning accompanied by former KGB Colonel Igor Prelin, executive director of the retired intelligence officers association.

Prelin’s last job at the KGB, explained Howard, was public relations chief. Now he acted as spokesman and majordomo for the old guard KGB-in-Exile.

Lena Orlova a.k.a. Larissa would be on hand to translate.

Howard said he would make the introductions, then let us get on with it, maybe return for dinner at Kryuchkov’s home.

Howard had become a stock market analyst (from traitor to trader), affiliated with a firm called Rye, Man and Gor Securities. As director of their analytical department, he was bullish on Aeroflot stock.

Howard told me he had visited Cuba two months earlier and was considering the purchase of a seafront apartment in Havana.

“Come meet me there,” he said. “I’ll introduce you to some Cuban intelligence people. Who knows, maybe there are some books in it for you.”

Don’t mind if I do, new avenues of opportunity for intelligence collection.

Howard claimed to have worked out how to retire in five years based upon investments in the Russian stock market.

As such, he’d already mapped out his future: Winters in Cuba, summers at a cabin on Lake Baikal, part-time consulting by fax and email.

(Five-year plans are a Russian tradition that rarely succeed.)

Ninety-minutes later we arrived at my hotel, the elegant Baltschug Kempinski.

I checked into my room (310) and returned to the lobby for further chitchat with Howard.

A woman plucked a harp while, around her, young Muscovites juggled multiple cell phones, Russia’s newest status symbol.

I asked Howard if he wanted to manage money for new clients.

Damn right he did. He could set up fiduciary accounts in Cyprus, said he; and, as some Russian stocks did not require conversion to rubles, he could buy and sell them in U.S. dollars. What’s more, he’d take only a 2.5 percent commission instead of the normal five percent.

“I’m close to the market,” said Howard. “I’m constantly on the phone to publicly-traded Russian companies to assess their activities.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Are you willing to travel to meet prospective clients?”

The FBI was still in a holding pattern on luring Howard to capture. Twenty-two months had passed since we’d been frozen “maybe as long as six months.”

Nevertheless, John H and I continued to scope out such opportunities in the event that we might one day get a green light..

“Sure,” replied Howard. “I’m traveling widely.” But, he added, no talk of travel on the phone, fax or internet.

I suggested we establish a code to make secure commo possible, and we both made identical notes:

Gorki = Geneva (Hotel Les Amures)

Kharkov = Zurich (Hotel Savoy)

Minsk = Warsaw (The Intercontinental)

St. Petersburg = Prague (The Intercontinental)

Samara = Havana (Hotel Nacional)

Always 12 p.m. in reception, one day past the date stipulated in communication.

Howard wanted to get into automobile insurance, which, he said, was virtually non-existent in Russia.

“What happens when cars collide?” I asked.

“The drivers fight it out.”

So Howard had cultivated a relationship with a Moscow-based insurance company called Rose gal, 49 percent owned by the Great American Life Insurance Company.

Howard departed for a business appointment, and I retired to my room.

The view of the Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral was so precious, I opened the French windows and ordered room service:

Beluga Malassol Caviar 56g, Buckwheat Blinis, A Glass of Vodka Stolichnaya

(Everything priced in Deutschmarks, no Russian rubles accepted.)

On my desk I plopped a current copy of the Washington Post’s Sunday book section— Book World—a back-stopping of my legend should anyone pay a visit to snoop around while I was out.

July 2005

John H phoned me from Washington on July 26th.

Headquarters had trashed our list of airports in Central Europe to rendition Edward Lee Howard. The Department of Justice wanted Milan or Rome.

“What’s your immediate thought on that?”

“Bollocks,” I said. “The Author may never visit Italy. And if he does, it wouldn’t be for many, many months.”

John H told me a new agent had been assigned the case at Headquarters, replacing John Q.

I was still in Stone Harbor so we agreed to rendezvous in Pennsville, New Jersey, my side of the Wilmington Bridge.

John H put his new supervisor, Chris H, on the phone for directions. I had no idea where exactly we’d meet, so I planned to arrive first, stake out a decent site, and call it in while they were on the road.

I arrived at 2:55 p.m. and settled on Chukkers, a tavern. It just sounded right. And desolate of other customers at this post-lunch hour.

The G-men arrived 45 minutes later: John H, Chris H, and Jim S.

Chris H was sturdy, thick mustache with intense eyes and serious demeanor.

John H got right down to it: Bucharest and Sofia had been ruled out by the Department of Justice.

Warsaw, a maybe.

It was down to the Bureau’s legat at the U.S. embassy in Warsaw to deal with the Polish government, gain their acquiescence. Chris H expected an update any minute.

“We’d need to know Howard’s flight arrival plans,” said Jim S.

“No problem,” I said. “I’ll tell Howard that I’ll meet his flight.” I had a new idea. “If Poland won’t work, how about Istanbul?”

Chris H perked up from his frosted mug of Coors Lite. “Istanbul might work.”

“I could fit it into the context of Spy’s Guide,” I said.

“Spy’s Guide?” said Chris H. “What’s that?”

I could only place my hand over my eyes and shake my head in dismay that the new supervision from headquarters had not been fully briefed on how we’d got to this point.

When we finished, about 5 p.m., we walked into the 100-degree sauna outside, shook hands, said goodbye.

As I drove back to Stone Harbor through Salem, Bridgeton, and Millville, I felt only sadness in my soul.

It struck me that every time I and the FBI team came up with a new solution, the Justice Department threw up two new hurdles.

The threshold for approval was forever on the rise, as if the higher-ups, as in political appointees, just did not want to go there.

Understanding that the FBI was clearly out of its depth on the potential of playing former KGB Chairman Kryuchkov, I kept former CIA operations chief Clair George apprised of this development.

At some point, Clair met CIA’s Eurasia Division Chief for a drink to lay it out.

He phoned me afterwards. “I can sum this up in one word,” said Clair. “He was astounded.”

“Did you explain how all this came about?”

“Sure. He was astounded. He’d never heard any of it.”

“Is that what astounded him?”

“The whole thing astounded him! He was astounded that he knew nothing about this. And he was astounded by having a key player like Kryuchkov in this position. He can’t believe the Bureau hasn’t told CIA about it.”

⁂

John H phoned me. “Chris has been busy,” he said, excitedly. “He’s gotten a positive response on Warsaw.”

Which meant we were now on course to rendition Edwards Lee Howard, i.e., capture him and return him to the United States for prosecution.

A six-week countdown began.

Then John H was again summoned to Washington.

He phoned me from Headquarters (Wednesday, August 30th) and asked that I make a dinner reservation at O’Donnell’s in Bethesda.

He was waiting there with Chris H and Jim S when I arrived just before seven o’clock.

A pall had been cast over the assembled G-men.

John H and Jim S explained that a “related conflict” had “suddenly” arisen at headquarters.

Consequently, there was no longer a big hurry to rendition Edward Lee Howard.

Consequently, the operation to apprehend Howard in Warsaw had been scrubbed at the eleventh hour and indefinitely postponed.

“We’ve been put in a holding pattern,” explained Jim S. “Maybe as long as six months.”

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that all our expended efforts (money, time, energy) had evolved into a non-rendition.

It seemed that, from the beginning, the notoriously politicized Justice Department never really had the gumption to go through with it.

They’d just been playing along, allowing everyone to spin their wheels, then, ultimately, shirking their responsibility.

We had met every demand they’d ever made to legally justify a rendition.

But they scrapped it at the eleventh hour anyway, worried about embarrassing the Russian government even while corrupt Russian leaders were laundering billions of dollars, and while the Russian intelligence services were taking advantage of eased tensions with the West by teaming up with organized crime groups and doubling its espionage efforts worldwide.

Put into perspective, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno could order the killing of innocent children at Waco, but couldn’t allow the arrest of a traitor.

Edward Lee Howard did, indeed, travel to Warsaw to research Spy’s Guide, arriving November 5th (1995) and departing two days later.

I later received Howard’s expense report.

Given the go-ahead, we would most certainly have arrested and repatriated Howard, an American traitor who crowed about being the only spy taught tradecraft by both the CIA and the KGB.

The FBI would not only have got its man, but an example would have been set for anyone else thinking of selling out their country.

The boys from the Bureau asked me to “hang in there,” i.e., keep Howard greased until such time that their “related conflict” could be resolved.

Meantime, we would carry on with Spy’s Guide and Vladimir Kryuchkov’s book, and I would be given scope to cultivate PI (positive intelligence), as recommended in November by Bob Blitzer, the Bureau’s counter-terrorism chief.

I knew then, in my bones, it was over; the Justice Department would never green-light the renditioning of Edward Lee Howard.

More time would pass, making it more difficult to prosecute this traitor for espionage, always a tough charge without an admission.

I went home demoralized.

But I awakened next morning with a new appreciation for the silver lining beneath this dark cloud:

At least I’d get a crack at the former KGB chairman.

June 1995

During the first week of June, ten weeks after my trip to see Edward Lee Howard in Geneva, I met FBI Special Agent John H in Chicago.

He greeted my United Airlines flight from Washington, D.C. and escorted me to a small conference room in the bowels of O’Hare Airport.

I had traveled to Chicago to loan moral support to National Press Books’ launching of Safe House by Edward Lee Howard at the American Booksellers Association’s annual convention.

Thus far, reviewers nationwide had ignored the title; consequently, sales were dismal.

Joseph and Sultan joked sourly that its poor showing must have been due to a CIA-plotted conspiracy to bury Howard’s book, which, in any case, had all its classified information excised out of it by the editor (me).

Meantime, John H and Bob G had solved their evidentiary crisis by dragging Howard’s wife, Mary, before a grand jury in Albuquerque to question her for the first time in ten years.

Bob G had finally found a legal loophole that forced her to testify against her spouse, and this time Mary incriminated Howard for laundering cash received by the KGB.

When Howard heard about this development, he assumed it was a retaliatory FBI response to the publication of his book, and he responded with outrage.

“Once again, they’re taking it out on my family,” Howard ranted to me over the phone. “Mary has to tell them what they want to know to keep herself out of the can. It doesn’t matter, because they can’t get me anyway. That’s our strategy.”

John H told me otherwise: When Howard learned that his wife had been spilling her guts, he demanded she send him divorce papers, suggesting he’d only stayed married to her in an attempt to prevent damaging spousal testimony against him.

U.S. Attorney Bob G now had what he needed to prove his espionage case.

It was time to press the top brass at the Department of Justice for a green light to reel Howard in. Especially since we now had him poised to travel to a handful of convenient destinations.

For the benefit of a senior Chicago FBI Special Agent who had laid on the logistics at O’Hare, John H detailed the mechanics of how our extraordinary rendition would play out:

Howard would arrive at the airport of our designated location.

At Immigration, before officially entering the country (a no-country zone known as an international corridor), Howard would be asked by Immigration officers to “come with us.”

They would escort him to a room situated in a limbo known as no man’s land. John H would be waiting there to make the arrest. He would then escort Howard to a U.S. military jet for a stealthy flight home.

By this time, I had received from Howard a proposal, in English, of what the former KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov would write.

It was wonderfully enticing. This I passed to John H. He was equally intrigued, but remained focused on Howard. And why not? We were getting so close, he could practically taste victory.

On July 1st, I decamped to Stone Harbor, New Jersey, for a lengthy summer vacation by the beach.

John H phoned on the 17th to report excellent progress with the Justice Department.

We honed our target capitals.

Then John H got summoned to Washington to present a final plan to the Big Cheese Family.

He told them this: Choose from three destinations—Warsaw, Bucharest, Sofia—and we can nail Howard in six weeks.

We already knew the techniques and mindset Howard maintained for low-profile foreign travel.

How?

Because Howard had penned a blueprint for me: A detailed chapter on tradecraft for the traveling spy!

Excerpts:

Plan where you’re going. Know the area... check out the establishment you want to meet somebody ahead of time, find the exits, learn the operating hours, and always think about how your opposition would approach you if he found you were there.

Make your travel reservations from a public phone, with a travel alias, use smaller foreign airlines (KGB officers always prefer using Mavel, the national Hungarian airline), pay cash for your tickets, change planes.

Spend a day or two in another city checking for shadows before going to your target area, make hotel reservations at the last possible moment. And once in a hotel, always approach it as if someone may be waiting for you.

Combine a different hairstyle with a pair of glasses and you’d be surprised how much your appearance changes.

You can’t trust anyone. No one said it would be easy to be a spy and this is one of the reasons why.

Early Spring, 1995

It was cold in Geneva—or Serene City, as I prefer to call it. Just above freezing; snow flurries interspersed with occasional sunshine.

Edward Lee Howard arrived at noon sharp for our rendezvous in the Noga Hilton lobby, a contemporary lounge decorated in black leather and chrome.

Howard had gained weight, maybe 15 pounds, since our meeting in Zurich five months earlier. His mood was glum and downbeat. His face was swollen; symptomatic, I thought, of heavy drinking.

He’d given up smoking, he said, and the absence of nicotine appeared to have taken a toll on his nerves.

Howard told me he’d traveled by train the day before from Interlaken, where he’d spent a week in a rented apartment with his wife and son.

No phone, no TV... he bitched that he’d never do it again.

I’d brought with me a half-dozen advance copies of Safe House, hot off the press.

Howard set to work signing books to me, Joseph, Sultan—and even one (unknown to Ed) destined for John H, his FBI pursuer.

My own mark, An Enigma Book, graced the title page.

Howard voiced unhappiness with the cover over the photograph of himself; he felt it did not do him justice.

Next order of business: Spy’s Guide.

Howard was full of beans on this project.

Moscow was three-quarters done, he told me. And he’d been to Vienna a few weeks earlier on business trip and knocked that one out, too.

He’d decided not to do Budapest himself but subcontracted to a KGB officer on site. (Budapest was FBI Assistant Director “Bear” Bryant’s first choice for a rendition. It was if Howard been warned off.)

He would research Geneva this very week.

“This is truly a spy’s city,” said Howard. “The Swiss don’t care what spies do here as long as there is no public scandal.”

Howard had also decided to delete Belgrade and substitute it with Bratislava, which, he said, was “a good town for covert operations.”

“Really?”

“For years,” said Howard, “the KGB considered Bratislava an ideal town for a spy on the run who wants to keep a low profile, hide cheaply, and be able to escape to one of three other countries by land within the hour.” He added, “This is where they used to sneak me across the border into Western Europe as a Soviet diplomat.”

“You’ve convinced me,” I said. “Do it.”

Also remaining: Prague, Bucharest, Sofia, and Warsaw.

We moved into lunch at Tse-Yang, a Chinese restaurant on the Noga Hilton’s mezzanine. Over steamed dumplings we explored the new book project Howard had cryptically alluded to over the phone.

“Once my book got cleared, there were some excited, very impressed people in Moscow,” explained Howard. “I got called to a meeting.”

“By whom?” I asked.

“Vladimir Kryuchkov [the former KGB chairman]. He summoned me to meet him in a public park.”

“Why a park?”

“Because Kryuchkov is under surveillance by Boris Yeltsin’s people,” said Howard. “He didn’t want it known he was meeting with me. He was with two others: Igor Batamirov...”

“Wasn’t that the guy Dick Cote met?”

Howard nodded. “An old friend of mine, Ames’s handler. And Igor Prelin.”

“Who’s he?”

“A former KGB colonel,” said Howard. “Prelin is general-director of the former intelligence officers association. They want to generate works for the Western market. The first one is Kryuchkov’s book. It’s already written.”

“In English?”

“No. Russian. It’ll soon be published in Russia. My friends are using their influence to get that stupid jerk Yeltsin out of office.”

“So send me Kryuchkov’s manuscript,” I said. “I’ll try to get it translated.”

Howard nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

After lunch we strolled the Quai des Bergues and ran into Howard’s wife, Mary, and his son, Lee. The four of us popped into the bar in Hotel des Bergues for refreshment.

Howard’s familial relationships seemed strained and tense.

Earlier, over lunch, Howard mentioned he was glad to live on his own without family pressures. Now, Lee reflected sunlight off his wristwatch into his father’s eyes to irritate him.

I pointed out that the small bar in which we sat deserved a mention in Spy’s Guide because it had no fewer than seven ways to get in and out.

Howard chuckled, “You could sneak out without paying.”

Lee chirped up. “You did that once, dad! Remember?”

Howard blushed, suggesting it was true; an awkward silence ensued.

Later, after his wife and son had left us, Howard produced his outline for Spy’s Cookbook.

This manual, Howard wrote, will walk a would-be turncoat through the basic steps of making a decision to steal and exploit secrets, contacting potential buyers, communicating securely with them, and what to do if caught.

Excerpts from Howard’s 13-page proposal:

Selling one little secret is an irreversible step! There is no such thing as being halfway pregnant. Likewise, there is no halfway point in espionage. You gave out secrets or you did not. It’s that simple when the jury meets. You can’t plead extenuating circumstances.

Your decision should be made in a cold and calculating manner. Look at the actual costs (operational expenses), potential life-long costs of being caught (jail or being beaten up), and finally the benefits.

Have a plan for a drastic change of life within a specified period of time. It’s like playing the stock market. You don’t buy into the market thinking it will always go up. You buy at a good price with a target sale price based on analysis. The same way with espionage. Think of it as a short-term business project with some prospect of profit and good prospect of risk.

Four rules for making the approach:

1) Assume the place you might want to make contact with is watched and bugged. Leave the car home, never use the phone, use disguises;

2) Make an untraceable offer. Verbal, one-on-one, in an anonymous location;

3) Have a plausible excuse (to would-be watchers and interrogators) for making your approach, a credible legend with back-up documents;

4) Take your time and be patient. Wait for your opportunity, never rush.

Your dealings will require special forms of payment. The best way is cash or a deposit in a secret account. If they want a receipt, never sign your real name. And unless your spouse is vital to the success of the project and takes equal risk, make every effort to keep your mouth shut.

If caught, don’t even give the time of day. Make accusations against the police for false arrest. If you’re part of a minority, make that an issue, or paint the case as a political frame-up. If you are really careful and do not confess, your chances of leaving jail are good.

I met Special Agent John H inside Le Bon Pain on 10th Street, opposite the Hoover Building, from which only problems and hurdles seemed to emanate.

I ordered a latte to-go, and we trudged across the street, up to the fourth floor where Supervisory Agents John Q and Jim S awaited us.

Their new problem in a nutshell: The Justice Department was waffling (as usual) holding up a rendition until they could be certain of the evidence stacked up against Edward Lee Howard.

Part of the evidence consisted of a financial log Howard kept that showed how he had laundered cash payments received from the KGB through his wife.

John H possessed a photocopy of the log, but it had been obtained improperly, so a judge might rule that it could not be used as evidence.

The assembled G-men wanted me to travel to Moscow, stay in Howard’s apartment, find the log, and photograph it as acceptable evidence.

Their legal rationale: I would be acting in Moscow as an extension of John H which, in effect, would serve as a search warrant.

“This has never been done before,” he said. “We’re on the cutting edge, a legal precedent. The question is, can we serve a search warrant like this. Usually, we have to leave an actual warrant behind.”

I was incredulous. The Bureau wanted me to risk my neck to collect something they already had in their possession!

Photography of the financial log was just Part One.

Part Two: gaining access to Howard’s computers and sucking them dry.

“Uh, let me ask you a question,” I said. “What happens if I get caught?”

“Ah,” said John Q, “that’s between you and him.”

John Q excused himself so that John H could address this issue.

“I don’t have diplomatic cover,” I said. “If I got caught, they’d throw me in prison, right?”

John H nodded. “The government would negotiate to get you out.”

Yeah, right.

Curiosity propelled me onward down a floor to the photo-lab. An expert determined that the best camera for this assignment was not the kind of miniature Minox cameras you see in spy movies, but a run-of-the-mill Olympus Infinity. He showed me the perfect distance for snapping documents.

Next, a computer-sucking lesson. For this, a trip to Fort Monmouth in Eatontown, New Jersey, the FBI’s northeast region computer center.

Tom M, the best in the Bureau, awaited me. He had sucked the hell out of Aldrich Ames’s computers. Now, he pulled a rectangular gizmo from his bag and plugged it into a laptop.

“This is it,” said Tom. “You just plug it into the parallel port. Then you insert this special laser disk, hit a few buttons, and bang—it sucks everything out.”

⁂

Clair George gasped when I told him what the FBI wanted next.

“This is starting to sound like a shitty novel,” he said. “What about your wife and children? Are the feebies planning to look after them if you get thrown into the slammer for five years? No. You’ll be on your own. Just tell them you’ve lived up to your end of the bargain. You’re in this to lure Howard out, not to photograph evidence in Moscow.”

Meanwhile, National Press and Howard had resolved their advance dispute: Howard would accept a few extra royalty points (pie-in-the-sky) in lieu of the immediate money due him.

The manuscript had been readied for publication and galley proofs dispatched to Howard for final correction.

I phoned Howard for a status update.

“I have some exciting news!” Howard bubbled, out of character. “Don’t tell a soul, it’s just between you and me.”

“Of course.”

“My friends here, you know who I mean?”

“I do.”

“They’ve read the galleys. And they are very impressed with how it turned out. I told them, this book closes a chapter in my life. And they said, no, no, no. We want you to do more of this.”

“Meaning what?”

“They want to get information out through me.”

“Go on.”

“They have book projects they want me to handle,” said Howard. “Starting with the man whose name starts with K.”

That would be Vladimir Kryuchkov, former Chairman of the KGB.

“This would be ideal for us,” added Howard.

“I’m in,” I said.

It was Presidents Day, a federal holiday. I found John H at home.

“I Just spoke with The Author,” I said. “He has some interesting news.”

“Oh?”

“He told me not to tell anyone.” I paused. “But I suppose I can tell you.”

John H chuckled.

“His patron, Mister K. You know who I mean?”

“Of course,” said John H.

“He wants to write his own book. And he wants The Author and me to help him.”

John H sighed. It meant new administrative hurdles to jump, for sure, but he was game. Anything to keep Howard happy and playing with us until we had a green light to cuff his wrists with steel.

Plus, as Bob Blitzer had said at headquarters, whatever happens with Howard, keep the operation spinning for positive intelligence.

At precisely 7:30 a.m., the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend, I found my way to the Badge Room at FBI Headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Moments later, John H appeared at my side.

“Good time in Zurich?” he asked.

“You would not believe.”

We crossed the cobblestoned courtyard, punched our badges, and strolled past portrait paintings in oil of past FBI directors:

J. Edgar Hoover, Clarence Kelly, a ghastly William Webster... up to the fourth floor, a restricted zone, down a long corridor to the office of Allyson G, whom I’d first and last seen at Clair George’s house 14 months before.

A tall, young if gray-haired Special Agent-in-Charge named John Q had just replaced Allyson as Headquarters’ supervisor on the Howard case.

We shook hands. John Q wore a good suit and had a green Pelikan pen clipped to his shirt pocket.

Down another long corridor, a security guard unlocked a conference room.

John H, John Q, and I were joined at a rectangular table by Jim S (John H’s boss in Albuquerque) and a Bureau employee named Dick A.

John H cued me to tell the assembled guests about myself.

One-third into my spiel, the Bureau’s counter-terrorism chief, Bob Blitzer, slipped into the room and took a seat to my left.

When I’d finished, Dick A spoke.

He asked questions about how I might feel when, after spending time with Edward Lee Howard and getting to know him, he got caught and put behind bars.

“You mean sort of like the Stockholm Syndrome?” I asked.

“Uh, yeah, that’s right,” said Dick A.

(The Stockholm Syndrome is a phenomenon whereby hostages cultivate sympathetic and protective feelings toward their kidnappers.)

“I’m doing a professional job,” I said. “The friendliness I establish with Howard is for one purpose only: for luring him to capture.”

The difference for me was this: If I had been a friend of Howard’s and someone, anyone, approached me to help capture my friend, my reply would be go to hell.

But this was an operation I actually conceived and was executing myself on the frontline, with the FBI’s authorization and support.

Pure business.

Dick A countered that he understood what I was saying, but that people never really knew how they were going to feel about this kind of thing until it’s about to climax.

The Bureau’s concern: I might have a change of heart at the last minute.

So Dick A wondered, would I be willing to take a battery of tests for evaluating my state of mind?

I looked around, incredulous.

“We’ve been at this for over a year,” I said. “And now you want me to take a test?”

I almost got up and walked out, but remained only from curiosity about what would come next.

Blitzer spoke up.

He had run a few renditions with Middle East terrorists, he said, and seen a couple go south on this very issue. So did I mind if he asked me a couple hard questions?

No wonder nobody wanted to spend time in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

“Shoot.”

Why did I think Edward Howard trusted me so much?

“Because I’m good at this,” I said. “My legend is fully back-stopped. He wants his book published. On top of that, he likes me.”

Blitzer nodded, zoomed his eyes into mine. How many others knew what I was really up to with Howard?

I raised a single finger. “Just one.”

“Who?” asked Blitzer.

“Clair George.”

No one objected.

John Q perked up from across the conference table. “Your wife doesn’t know?”

“No.”

“Would you be willing to take a polygraph test somewhere down the line?” asked Blitzer.

I shrugged. “Why not.”

“You know,” said John H. “The president is going to have to sign off on this. And someone from the White House is going to ask, Has this guy taken a polygraph? That’s why it’s important.”

“Not a problem,” I said.

Blitzer launched into operational security.

First off, how did I communicate with John H in Albuquerque?

I telephoned him at his office on Silver Street in Albuquerque.

No good, said Bob B. He wanted an anonymous cut-out number for me to call, with a different area code.

Next, my own copies of reports and notes pertaining to Howard. Where did I keep them?

At home.

Blitzer fretted that the KGB might break into my house to check me out.

Solution: The Bureau should supply me with a safe.

Finally, the rendition itself.

To which destinations could I lure Howard?

“Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Bucharest, Sofia, Helsinki, Vienna—take your pick,” I said. “He’s agreed to visit all of these places.”

Blitzer nodded, impressed. It gave him more than enough to work with.

“It’s better that you are as detached as possible from the actual rendition,” he said. “That way, Howard himself won’t know your role in this.”

I shrugged. “However you execute this is fine by me.”

We would be on hold, said Blitzer, until the Justice Department gave a final nod.

Bob G, Jim S and John H would deliver a formal presentation two weeks hence.

But whatever their decision, said Blitzer, I should continue my contact with Howard with a view toward cultivating positive intelligence from my relationship with the defector.

Indeed, the irony of putting the KGB in Central Europe to work on Spy’s Guide was savored by all in attendance.

We adjourned.

“About those tests,” said John H as we strolled the long corridor. “When...?”

“Tell them to shove their battery up their...”

“Yeah, I figured as much,” said John H.

Needless to say, I could hardly wait to be back at headquarters, as invited.

Next morning we ascended to the seventh floor where the Big Cheese Family resided.

John H, John Q and I strolled into the large corner office of Robert “Bear” Bryant, Assistant Director for National Security, after first meeting his deputy, John Lewis.

Bryant had a large paunch and a mumbling growl of a voice; part grizzly, part teddy bear.

“So where are we on this?” he asked, handing me his business card.

John H briefed the assistant director.

John Q pitched in.

I did, too.

Specifically, I mentioned Edward Howard’s new idea to write Spy’s Cookbook, a manual for double-agents.

Bryant shook his head and growled his support for our operation.

He wanted to haul Howard in, he said, and he ventured his opinion that Budapest would be our best bet.

Bryant thanked me.

I pointed to John H. “He’s the real hero,” I said. “This job takes patience, and this guy’s got the patience of a saint.”

John H and Bryant had started their careers together as rookie Special Agents in Seattle. Bryant jumped into the fast lane and rose through the ranks; John H had plodded on, content to settle in New Mexico. If he had any further ambition, it was to teach Sunday school in retirement.

We stood. Bryant shook my hand.

I now had the confidence of the Bureau’s national security division at its most senior level.

Next day I met with Joel Joseph and Alan Sultan at National Press.

With advance orders under 6,000 copies, and a cool reception from sales reps, Howard’s book had become more trouble than it was worth.

Sultan favored killing it. Joseph wanted to publish, but only if Howard’s literary agent backed off and waived the remainder of his advance.

Would I talk to Howard, they asked, and resolve this crisis?

I reached Edward Howard at his Dacha. He answered, but something appeared wrong with the telephone connection.

I hung up, touch-keyed again.

Howard answered. Nothing wrong with the line. It was him, incoherence-squared.

“Call me to-mor-row,” he finally managed.

When I reached him next afternoon, Howard was still plastered, in the midst of what must have been a colossal binge.

Either I could not hear him, or he could not talk, I wasn’t sure which, so I disconnected, redialed.

Howard answered after eight rings.

“Is that you, Ed?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“It’s me, Robert.”

“Yeah. Ro-bert.”

“Ed, you don’t sound well.”

“I’m drink-king.”

“Why?”

“I lost my biz-i-nez.”

“How? What happened?

Howard lapsed into incoherence.

“When should I call you again?” I asked.

“One day.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yeah. One day.”

I tried him next day.

Howard was no longer drunk, and suffering a mammoth hangover.

“I was drinking.” He said this like a schoolboy caught cheating on an exam.

“For how long?”

“Four days. Man, I need some aspirin.”

“What’s happening with your business?”

“I lost my office, had to move out.”

“Is that why you were drinking?”

“I had a fight with my girlfriend,” said Howard.

“Sorry to hear that. Look, here’s the deal on your book. National Press will kill it unless you forego the rest of the advance.”

“Okay, I’ll tell my agent to back off.”

“And you’re still gung-ho on Spy’s Guide?”

“Yes.”

I phoned John H, clued him in.

“For a few minutes there,” I said, “I thought Howard was dying.”

“That would have put you out of a job,” said John H.

“It’s not the way this story is supposed to end,” I said.

“No.”

In keeping with Bob Blitzer’s wishes to improve operational security, John H gave me a new telephone number, a ghost line with a 202 area code, created specifically for my calls to him.

“I’m coming to Washington,” said John H. “We have a new problem.”

November 1994

There is no finer city for a spy than Zurich in mid-November for evoking a sense of place.

Cold, dark gloominess contrasted by warmly lit tea-rooms and beer-cellars; old-fashioned trams running up and down the main drag past shop windows glittering with chocolates wrapped in gold.

A taxi twisted and turned through the city center, dropping me at Hotel Kindli, as recommended by CIA defector Edward Lee Howard.

The hotel was, appropriately, veiled by gray plastic sheeting (erected to retain renovation dust).

Awaiting me at the registration desk, this handwritten message from Howard:

Meet in reception 18:00.

I asked for Howard’s room number and learned he was not staying at this hotel after all (or if so, under an alias). I peeked into the drab, depressing room they had reserved for me and returned downstairs.

“I need a better room,” I said.

“It’s all we have.”

“Then I need a better hotel. Where’s the Savoy?”

She pointed me toward Bahnhofstrasse and I trudged with my carryall in pouring rain.

The five-star Savoy processed me into their heaven compared to Kindli’s hell. And it was secure: the elevator required a key to ascend, add a vigilant team of receptionists, porters, and concierge.

At 5:40 p.m. I made my way back to the Kindli, left a message at reception for Howard to find me in their restaurant. That’s where I planted myself, sipping nutty Swiss white wine.

Howard arrived a few minutes later; punctual, just as he was in Moscow four months earlier. I waved from across the empty room and he bounded over.

Howard’s hair was freshly trimmed and he looked relaxed in blue jeans, striped button-down shirt, sneakers, and a brown anorak with faux fur collar.

I told Howard I’d found the Kindli inadequate, so hadn’t checked in. He confirmed that he, too, was lodging elsewhere—a Swissair Hotel between the airport and city center; that he had arrived two days earlier on Aeroflot “with some Russians” with whom he had business.

Howard ordered a Coke and proceeded to chain Salems.

“I have to get out of Russia every four or five months,” he said, “to keep from going nuts.”

That’s why Howard loved my idea to research Spy’s Guide. It would not only allow him to travel out of Russia but do so on somebody else’s tab.

And—unbeknownst to Howard— that somebody else was the FBI.

Howard dug into his back pocket and produced a fax from Joel Joseph that he’d received just before departing Moscow. It said, in essence, that due to legal problems over his book, National Press would not pay the balance of the agreed advance.

Howard was philosophical about it: At least they were proceeding publication—and he’d get his new car from the old KGB.

He also showed me a fax from ABC News’ Moscow correspondent David Ensor requesting an interview.

I took possession of it for the publisher’s publicity file and asked Howard what kind of business he was doing in Zurich.

“I’m introducing Russians to Volksbank so they can open numbered Swiss bank accounts,” replied Howard.

The hardest part, he snickered, was convincing Russians to accept Swiss bank interest rates, a paltry amount compared to what they could earn in Russia with highly volatile rubles.

Aside from that, he had two other clients: A German trying to collect a debt owed by the USSR. And an Austrian trying to establish a life insurance company in Russia. Neither client knew Howard’s real name or background.

“I’m working at about 60 percent capacity,” said Howard. “It suits me just fine because it leaves me free for book projects like ours.”

I asked Howard if he had a favorite restaurant in Zurich; he suggested Movenpick, part of a high-quality Swiss chain, around the corner on Bahnhofstrasse.

We moseyed over, sat upstairs. Both of us ordered honey-glazed ham; hot tea for Ed, white wine for me.

“Still not drinking?” I asked him.

“I might be tempted to crack a bottle of champagne on New Year’s Eve.”

It had been just over a year, he said, since he’d touched the sauce. Now he was working on his smoking habit. He’d already invested two C-bills on nicotine patches, to no avail.

I asked after George Blake, the British spy.

Howard smiled and told me he had attended Blake’s 72nd birthday party one week before. “About a dozen people were there. I was the only Westerner. George is coming to my place next week for Thanksgiving,” he added.

After much effort, Howard said he managed to find a frozen turkey from Arkansas in some Moscow supermarket; that he’d just found a can of cranberry sauce in Zurich.

“Now I’m on the prowl for pumpkin pie mix,” he added, not appreciating the incongruity of his scavenger hunt.

I laughed. It sounded, well, so pathetic.

Blake had become a mentor to Howard, he said, a Dutch uncle.

“You want to know the secret of Blake’s success?” Howard posed.

I nodded.

“Prison. Six years.” Howard blew a gust of tobacco smoke. “He knows firsthand what the alternative to Moscow is like. He prefers Moscow. He taught me that when you know your family is okay and taken care of, everything is all right. Relax. Enjoy life. My KGB friends love the Spy’s Guide project,” continued Howard. “They laughed. They think it’s a great idea, and they want to help. Igor Batamirov wants to help me do Moscow,” Howard bubbled. “And we can get KGB people in all the other cities to give us the information we need.”

Yeah, right—we’d put KGB officers throughout Central Europe on the FBI payroll.

“All I need to do,” said Howard, “is pop into a city, meet the local KGB guy, pick up his information, check it out myself, and move on to the next spot.”

We spent a good hour in Movenpick developing Spy’s Guide. Howard was ready to get cracking on it right after Christmas. I agreed to pay him a five-grand advance, half to start, half on completion. As for expenses, I’d cover everything on behalf of the Bureau. Howard would fly cheap on Aeroflot and stay in three-star hotels. We estimated $500 per city, including airfare.

Said Howard, “It would be nice to be able to pay something to a KGB officer in each city for basic information.”

“How much do you think they’ll want?” I asked.

“More than I’m prepared to offer,” said Howard. He guessed $500 apiece would be sufficient.

“We can work something out,” I said. “As long as they’re prepared to sign receipts.”

(A strict Bureau requirement to keep the bean-counters happy.)

“No problem,” said Howard.

He asked that I wire funds to a numbered account in Zurich, details of which he scribbled for me (not the same account he gave National Press—so now we had two Swiss accounts).

He also requested that I prepare a questionnaire for his KGB respondents throughout Central Europe.

“They’ll need instructions about the kinds of things we want to know,” said Howard.

I covered the tab at Movenpick and Howard offered dessert at Cafe St. Gothard, down the strasse.

That’s where we shortlisted our Spy’s Guide destinations: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, Helsinki and Geneva.

Over ice cream sundaes, Howard told me that a couple months earlier he’d visited Lake Baikal in Siberia, which he called one of his favorite places in the world. He’d been tempted to buy a plot of lakefront land to build a house.

“Eight hundred square meters [2,600 square feet] for only $5,000!” Howard’s eyes danced. “I should have made a deal, but I got talked out of it by friends in Moscow. They said, ‘Why would you want to go way out there?’ But they’re city people, what do they know? There’s a new air service called Air Baikal. You can fly nonstop in five-and-a-half hours.”

Howard moaned about problems he was having with his dacha. It needed repairs. The management was unsympathetic, so he’d gone to his KGB friends and they leaned on management to fix the plumbing, heating, and a leaky roof.

“How are your KGB buddies?” I asked.

Howard told me he was tired of partying with them because they drank too much and moaned about their lives.

“It used to be they’d drink and be jovial,” he said. “But now they drink and complain.”

“Why?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Look,” said Howard. “These guys earn the equivalent of $750 per month, and that’s fine if you don’t mind living like a Russian. It’s three times what a Russian earns. But these guys have lived in Paris and Rome, and they’ve gotten sophisticated. They don’t want to live like Russians. So all they do is complain and curse Yeltsin. Morale is very bad.”

Howard added that the best and the brightest had left the KGB.

“What do they do?” I asked.

“They either go into international trade or join the mafia.” Howard lowered his voice. “What I’d really like is to get some marijuana. But whenever I talk about it with my Russian friends they’re horrified. I try to explain that marijuana is safer than all the booze they drink, but they don’t want to know.”

I plucked a small 35mm camera from my pocket and asked a waitress if she’d mind snapping a photo of Howard and me.

I wanted a memento of the occasion, mindful that I was scheduled, upon my return from Switzerland, to make my first appearance at FBI Headquarters.

⁂

Next day at one p.m., Howard met me in my hotel lobby. It was raining again; we cut around the corner to a sub-level restaurant called Kropf.

“So how’d it go with your literary agent?” I asked.

Howard had planned to phone her right after we parted the night before to discuss National Press’s plan to scrap the balance due on his advance.

“Oh, yeah, I want to tell you about that.”

A waitress took our order, the lunch special: speck and sauerkraut.

“She tore into Joel Joseph,” said Howard. “She told him that she’s fed up, that everyone knew there’d be legal problems when we started, and if they didn’t pay up she’d do them for breach. Yeah, she was really tough.”

“What did Joel say?”

“He said, ‘I hear you.’ No real commitment. I said to my agent, ‘Why were you so tough?’ She said, ‘It’s my job.’ Man, all I want is to see my book published. She asked Joel, ‘Are you going to publish or not?’ And he said, ‘I don’t want to say anything over the phone because I’ve been advised by the ACLU that my phones are tapped, so I’ll Fed Ex you’.” Howard shook his head in disgust. “As if the FBI couldn’t open a Fed Ex. It’s obvious, Joel has F-D.”

“F-D?”

“Yeah, F-D,” said Howard. “Federal Disease. I’ve seen it happen, many times.”

“Federal Disease?”

“Yeah, it’s when the feds turn up. It makes people nervous, jumpy. They get scared. Joel’s definitely got F-D.”

This took us into talking about the FBI. Howard told me they would still love to capture him.

“After all this time?” I asked.

“It’s an institutional thing,” said Howard. “I embarrassed the FBI. I escaped before their eyes. I’ll tell you this, the FBI agent who hauls me in will get promoted to GS-16 overnight.”

Clear skies greeted us outside Kropf. We walked across the river to Zurich’s old town. I asked Howard if he thought he was being watched by Russians looking out for his safety.

“No,” said Howard. “If anyone’s following me, it would be Swiss Intelligence, to see what I’m up to, but I doubt it. My lawyer once made representations to Switzerland, and the answer we got back was, ‘We have no interest in Mister Edward Howard.’”

We nipped into a tearoom for Viennese cream cakes. Howard voiced a thought about Jonathan Pollard, the American who spied for Israel, got caught, convicted, and imprisoned.

“My KGB friends laughed so hard,” said Howard. “They thought the Pollard episode was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.”

“They’ve got Pollard down in Marion, Illinois,” I said. “He hangs out with John Walker and Edwin Wilson.”

“I wonder where they’d put me if they had a chance?” said Howard.

I suggested Leavenworth.

Howard snickered.

Back at Hotel Savoy, we found a cozy corner on the mezzanine for a final session on Spy’s Guide. An outline and appendices.

“You’ve got to do a chapter on tradecraft for the traveling spy,” I said.

Howard concurred.

“And what about the things every spy should carry on the road?” I added.

Howard nodded. “Why not.”

“Do you ever carry a weapon, Ed?”

“Never. I’m not a weapons man. I only know what they taught us at The Farm: use a briefcase, or anything else you can grab.”

Next: False identity documents, and how they could be purchased on the Russian black market.

“I could get you a genuine Russian passport for $500,” said Howard. “It only takes a month. You know, I’ve got another book idea.”

“Yeah? What?”

“How to Sell Government Secrets. A handbook for double-agents.”

I laughed. “Cool. Is that the title?”

“No,” said Howard. “I’d call it Spy’s Cookbook.”

“Catchy.”

“It would drive the CIA and the FBI nuts.” Howard grinned. “I’ve already worked out the chapters.”

“Let’s hear it. Mind if I take notes?”

I scribbled while Howard dictated an outline.

Chapter One: Making the Decision to Turn.

Chapter Two: Formulating the Plan and Valuing your Information.

Chapter Three: Making the Approach.

Chapter Four: How to Negotiate.

Chapter Five: How to Hide your Money.

Chapter Six: Secure Communications.

Chapter Seven: The Weakest Link (A Woman).

Chapter Eight: Getting Caught: Deny Everything, Admit Nothing.

“Gee, Ed, you’ve really thought this through.”

“Yeah,” said Howard. “I’ll include cases where guys screwed up: Boyce, Walker, Pollard, Ames. Espionage is a dangerous game, like playing with heroin. If they ever got their hands on me, they’d probably hold Spy’s Cookbook up in court and say, ‘See, he must have done it.’ It would probably get me an extra 20 years. Ha-ha-ha!”

Howard rarely laughed, let alone crack his own joke.

A moment’s reflection here:

This is no joke.

Howard really did offer to sell secrets to the KGB.

They accepted his offer. He delivered.

Howard provided sensitive intelligence that compromised several very sensitive, very costly operations.

He was a fugitive, a defector, and a traitor.

Howard’s motives were greed and vindictiveness, and he deserved to be captured, prosecuted, and imprisoned for his actions.

Nothing I write here is meant to make light of Howard’s malicious treachery.

American defectors suffer a grim reality in Russia.

They never adjust; depression and suicide hover nearby.

Just ask Edward Snowden. I have no doubt he would love to make a deal and return to the USA.

And like all defectors, he thinks maybe he’ll be able to make a deal that precludes prison time.

He won’t. He can’t. That’s not how the system works.

If you’re a fugitive, and especially if you’re a defector, you have to come home, get arrested, cuffed, and placed in a cell before any plea bargaining can commence.

Or stay where you are and remain in the cell you’ve chosen for yourself, becoming less and less relevant, more and more bitter, more and more homesick.

Until...

a) you commit suicide,

b) they trade you for political favors, or

c) they kill you “by accident” because your presence becomes inconvenient.

July 1994

Breakfast aboard British Airways from Moscow was without flavor though I managed to wash part of an omelet into my system with a quarter-bottle of champagne. A celebration seemed in order for an assignment well done.

After checking into my room at The Britannia Hotel, diagonally across from the U.S. Embassy on Grosvenor Square, I picked up the phone and touch-keyed a number.

“Are you here?” asked FBI Special Agent John H.

“You mean has the eagle landed?” I said. “Yup.”

“How did it go?”

“Swimmingly. I’m in room 137. Come over whenever you’re ready.”

“You kidding? I’ll be right there!”

This was John H’s reason for being in the British capital—and he was very excited about whatever he would learn about my visit with Edward Lee Howard in Moscow.

Minutes later, my door knocked.

I let John H in, closed the door behind him.

“Well?” he asked in high anticipation.

“Did you know Ed was in Santa Fe recently?” I deadpanned this.

“Really?” John H feigned nonchalance but it would have been a big deal if Howard had slipped in and out of New Mexico.

“Yeah.” I paused. “It’s a restaurant in Moscow.”

John H laughed, relieved. “I’m expected at the embassy in a little while to make some calls,” he said. “What I need from you is the essence.”

Essentially, I told him, Edward Howard was prepared to travel around Central Europe, unguarded, to research Spy’s Guide, the new book proposed to him.

John H’s eyes sparkled, a broad smile.

“And,” I added, “you’re not going to believe what he told me about Aldrich Ames.”

John H hunched over a notebook and madly scribbled as I spoke.

When we were done, he mentioned that some of his FBI colleagues were in town. Did I mind if they joined us for dinner?

Of course not. I buzzed the concierge to amend our dinner reservation at Quaglino’s as John H split to the U.S. embassy to make his calls.

A few hours later our foursome assembled in the Britannia’s lobby: Me and John H, Les Wiser and Jim Milburn, from FBI Headquarters. We exchanged greetings.

“So how’d it go at the embassy?” I asked John H.

He beamed. “Everyone’s satisfied.”

The three G-men climbed into the backseat of a Range Rover.

I got up front with Alpha 26, my driver, a Rasputin lookalike I call Mister Five because he enjoys all five symptoms of schizophrenia.

The maitre d’ at Quaglino’s led us—minus Mister Five—to a table and I ordered a vintage Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

John H’s colleagues had a focused interest in Aldrich Ames, not least because Wiser and Milburn led the Bureau’s investigation that, running parallel with a CIA team of counterintelligence investigators, busted the turncoat.

They lapped up what I’d learned from Edward Howard more hungrily than their spiced lamb and garlic mashed potatoes.

We walked out into the night, still light at 9:30.

“You guys fancy a nightcap?” I asked.

Mister Five drove us onward to The Savoy Hotel.

I pointed out Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, and the Strand.

Mike McKenzie was tickling the ivories & ebonies when we strolled into the American Bar and plunked ourselves at a table next to his grand piano.

“Play it, Mike,” I said. “Sweet Music.”

He obliged me with his own composition.

The others called out tunes: As Time Goes By, Cavatina.

We drank single malt scotch whiskey, joked, and laughed.

Needless to say, London was heaven compared to Moscow’s hell.

July 1994

After finishing our meal at the Moscow restaurant Santa Fe, Edward Lee Howard and I returned to the Radisson Hotel and ascended its grand spiral marble staircase to its Business Center.

Howard had brought along his copy of Richard Cote’s rewrite, which I now had to edit.

As we walked, I asked, “Do you ever get recognized by anyone, Ed?”

“Only once,” Howard replied. “By a foreign student in Budapest who had just read the David Wise book about me. He freaked out.”

We settled at a conference table and set to work, a page-by-page analysis.

I scoured Howard’s corrections, additions, deletions while he chain-smoked Doral cigarettes.

When we finished, Howard went off for a sauna in the hotel’s health club.

I returned to my room to empty my head into a pocket notebook.

At 8:45 p.m. I returned to the lobby, a lavish affair with a gargantuan chandelier, beneath which a pianist tapped out musical notes that flew around the huge, acoustically-challenged room without cohesion.

Howard found me inspecting an arcade of display windows.

“What’s all this about?” I motioned at Gianni Versace couture and crocodile shoes.

“The average Russian can’t afford this stuff,” Howard sneered with disdain. “He earns about $80 a month. Shall we have a drink at the Press Club?”

We entered the club. Howard signed a membership book and we rumped our rears on stools at the bar. Howard ordered Pepsis for us both.

“You do pretty well in Russian,” I said.

“I do okay. I don’t speak that great, but I understand everything.”

On stage nearby, a trio of musicians performed a masterful rendition of the theme from the movie Once Upon a Time in America.

An unexpected pleasure for me though Howard seemed oblivious to its poignancy.

“So what’s next?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“After Safe House is published. Any plans to write another book?”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” said Howard. “You have something in mind?”

“Matter of fact I do.” I sipped my Pepsi. “Spy’s Guide to Central Europe.”

Howard smiled. “Yeah, I like that.”

“A tongue-in-cheek travel guide with a spy theme,” I continued. “After all, who knows Central Europe better than a well-traveled spy?”

“I could do that,” said Howard.

“Moscow, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, et cetera. Hotels and restaurants, bars and nightclubs, museums, shopping...”

“And you’d publish this yourself?” asked Howard.

“That’s right. My own imprint. Enigma Books. Nothing to do with National Press.”

“Yeah, I like that.”

“You research it,” I said. “I’ll write it. You get the byline, because, well, you’re the spy!”

Howard smiled big. He really, truly loved this idea.

We drained our soda and sauntered out for Howard’s nickel tour of Moscow.

He parked near Red Square. Young men loitered all around, checking us out. Howard told me his Volvo had been busted into once.

“And I had a tire slashed a couple weeks ago,” he added. “Some hoodlum knew I was in a Western-style supermarket. He thought I’d put down a bag of groceries to change my tire and then he’d grab the bag and run.”

A young man approached us, said he wanted to sell old Russian postage stamps. We told him no, but he persisted, following us for five minutes before finding others to harass, and we wandered around St. Basil’s Cathedral.

Howard pointed to a viewing stand above the Kremlin wall.

“That’s where I viewed the May Day Parade with the generals,” he reminisced. “Most of them are disgraced now.”

He pointed to another ornate building, now derelict. “That used to be the Communist Party Museum.”

We returned to where Howard had parked.

“My car is still there,” he said, as if he expected it not to be.

“I guess things have changed here, Ed?”

“Yeah, it’s gotten rough.”

“Do you see yourself always living in Moscow?”

“No,” said Howard. “I don’t know. I’d like to visit Chile, Argentina.”

“To live?”

“I wish. But they’d find me.”

“How?”

“Through family.”

A fugitive’s weakest link.

Howard drove us to his apartment in Old Town, the Arbat district, which featured narrow and dark roads.

He exchanged greetings with his concierge, a babushka who lived on the ground floor and observed other tenants and their guests.

Up one flight of stairs, Howard keyed two locks.

“Does Moscow have a burglary problem?” I asked.

“It’s getting worse.”

We entered a long corridor. I followed Howard into the first room on the right, his kitchen. He put kettle to gas fire.

“Just as well you decided to stay at the Radisson,” said Howard. “During the summer they take turns switching off hot water in districts around Moscow. Mine has been off for three weeks.”

He showed me around his pad. On one end, a living room with a small, glass-enclosed terrace, overlooking some trees; at the other end, two small bedrooms, one transformed into a home-office.

“I guess I’ll stay here tonight,” sighed Howard.

Normally, he would drive 40 minutes to his dacha.

I was glad to be staying elsewhere; Howard’s apartment gave me the creeps.

We sat in the living room.

“You own this place?” I asked.

“Yeah. Yeltsin gave apartment dwellers a one-time chance to buy their apartment for a token fee. I’m told it’s now worth $300,000.”

“And the dacha? You own that?”

“No.” Howard shook his head. “I may lose it.”

“Why?”

“Budget cutbacks. There’s two things that could happen: One, some general wants it, they take it from me and give it to him. Or two, they just shut it down, no one lives there.”

“Why would they do that?”

“It’s expensive to maintain. Constant repairs. Full-time security. I can see them saying, It’s too expensive, shut it down.”

“What would you do, live here?”

Howard shrugged. “I’d have to.”

The kettle whistled. I followed Howard back into his kitchen; he brewed two cups of English breakfast tea.

I sat at his small table. Howard remained on his feet. A propos of nothing, he returned to The Deal we had touched on earlier in the day.

“It’s awfully tempting to try to make a deal like that,” said Howard. “But I’ve made a life here. I’ve been here nine years. I’ve set up a business. It would be hard to turn my back on that.”

“If that’s the case, I guess you ought to stick it out,” I said.

But Howard was just rationalizing.

“The U.S. government should have to pay me back for these nine years,” he continued. “You know, there’s something called the Mole Relief Act. I think it means that if I’m proven innocent, the government would have to compensate me for the nine years of misery they’ve caused.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I read about it recently. The Mole Relief Act.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “I’m going to smoke. Let’s go out on the terrace.”

I followed Howard through the living room to his narrow terrace. He grew pensive, took me through his exchange of faxes with FBI Special Agent John H.

“Maybe you could write something for me I could fax to him,” said Howard. “But there’s still a problem with the Russians.”

“Why?”

“My KGB contacts will say, Don’t rock the boat. They’ll say, we’re fine with what you’re doing, but if word filters up to Yeltsin’s people, it may mean trouble.”

Howard wanted to take a walk, so we grabbed our jackets and aimed ourselves into a light drizzle outside.

His street was dark and muddy.

“A couple of female news correspondents rent an apartment above me, one English, one American,” said Howard. “I’ve invited down for drinks a few times, but they’ve thought of every excuse not to come.”

“Do they know who you are?”

“No. Nobody knows. I go by the name Ed Janovich. I keep a low profile.”

Within a couple of minutes we reached Arbat’s main street, a winding pedestrian precinct. Scores of teenagers, based on booze, congregated on the cobblestoned path. Empty beer bottles strewn around; broken glass littered the pavement. Vodka and cigarettes changed hands for cash at a busy kiosk.

Nearby, a roaring fire in a large trash can warmed whoever needed toasting. It made me think of the proles in George Orwell’s 1984.

“This is the most fashionable street in Moscow,” said Howard.

We strolled past Baskin-Robbins, closed at this hour, about 11 p.m. Then a pizzeria. Howard wanted to pop in for dessert, but they were closing, too.

It seemed like Howard wanted the evening to continue, to be in my presence as long as he could; starved, perhaps, for American companionship.

Years later, a scene in the TV series Millennium reminded me of Howard this July night in Moscow:

In it, Frank Black recognizes a devil and says, “You must be so lonely.” When the devil repeats this line to three other devils sitting inside a donut shop, they look down, recognizing the truth they all share. One by one, they slink out into the night.

Howard and I turned around and again walked past the young drunks of Arbat. Ed bought a pack of Dorals from the kiosk and we trudged through sludge to his apartment building.

“You want to come back in?” asked Ed.

“Nah, I’m beat—let’s call it a night.”

As he drove me to the Radisson, Howard said, “Can you believe this is the best part of Moscow? You can’t imagine what it’s like in other parts of town.”

Sad. So very sad. For Moscow. For Howard.

⁂

Next morning, 6:15 sharp, Howard rounded into the Radisson’s forecourt. Punctuality was a trait he shared with John H, his FBI pursuer.

I climbed in, and we took off to the airport.

“I really like your idea about a Spy’s Guide,” said Howard as I prepared to alight from his Volvo.

“Great.”

“I could take research trips myself. Would you cover expenses?”

“Of course.”

“And you think there’s money in it?”

I nodded. “I’ll pay your time, at least.”

“Would I make a couple of thousand?” asked Howard.

“At least that.”

“Then I’ll do it.” Howard double-parked outside departures and we shook hands on Spy’s Guide.

I ventured into the terminal, a gauntlet of exit hurdles to vault.

Behind me, Edward Lee Howard returned to his austere existence as a defector.

July 1994

After emptying my head of notes while inside a Radisson hotel room, I descended to the lobby to reconnect with Edward Lee Howard.

We drove to Howard’s office so he could check on incoming faxes.

Howard told me his wife and son would arrive in Moscow five days hence and stay a month. They wanted to visit St. Petersburg, he said, so he intended to accompany them and play tour guide.

“How are you able to maintain your marriage like this?” I asked.

“It’s tough,” said Howard. “Mary and I see each other at Christmas and during the summer. I don’t ask her questions and she doesn’t ask me any. It’s what you’d call mature love.”

“And when she’s here, it’s as if nothing has changed?”

“That’s right. My in-laws are coming, too,” Howard added.

“Everything’s cool with them?”

“It’s okay now. At first they didn’t want Mary to see me again. It took some time. But we got over the emotional difficulties. I’ve got their support. And that’s the main reason I want this book written. I just want my side of the story out there where my family can see it. Then I can move on.”

“And your son?”

“We have a good relationship. We had a long talk when he was eleven, after he found a copy of the David Wise book [The Spy Who Got Away]. Lee knows I’m not a spy. I’m a political refugee.”

I told Howard that National Press planned to submit his manuscript to the CIA for review.

“They have to,” I said, “to protect themselves from accusations of receiving and publishing classified material.”

“I see.” Howard was displeased by this news, not least because he anticipated, correctly, that the CIA would try to freeze all monies due him, and likely succeed.

Traffic had slowed because 12 large crates of bottled beer had fallen from a truck in front of us. Cars veered around the mess; some motorists jumped out of their vehicles to loot the few bottles that lay unbroken in the street.

A half-mile later, Howard parked and we crossed the street to his office, which was housed within a yellow cinderblock structure.

“I’m in a medical building,” said Howard. “It’s cheap.”

We walked through an unlocked front door.

A few yards on, first door on the left, Howard keyed a single lock and we entered.

The drab, two-room office was illuminated by dim wattage. It reeked of stale tobacco. Cigarette smoke had permeated the carpets, the furniture, and stained the walls brown.

Howard checked for faxes. None.

“Who are your clients these days?” I asked.

“Some Germans, Swedes. A Spaniard. He paid for me to meet him in Vienna last month.”

“So you manage to travel a bit?”

“Yeah,” said Howard. “Neutral countries mostly, like Switzerland and Austria.”

“How do you find clients?”

“Through advertising. I started with the International Herald Tribune, but that was terrible. I only got people who wanted to sell me things. The Economist is best.”

Howard re-locked his office and we walked down the road to a Tex-Mex restaurant called Santa Fe.

“They’ve only been open four months but doing pretty well,” said Howard. “It’s a good thing we’re eating early. It’ll be packed later, with a line to get in.”

Santa Fe was quiet at 5:30 p.m., a few barflies.

The maitre’d sat us with menus printed in English, priced in U.S. dollars.

I ordered Heineken; Howard, a tonic. He lit another Doral and chained his way through dinner: beef fajitas for him, a chicken sandwich for me.

“Your book is going to need some new hooks,” I said. “So let’s talk about that now.”

“Fine.”

“First. Your knowledge about Russian spies inside the U.S. Government beyond Ames.”

“There are plenty of them,” said Howard.

“Okay, let’s expand on that. Start with the American who tipped you off about your wife cooperating with the FBI during your secret trip to the U.S. in ‘86. Where would he have worked to gain access to the documents he showed you?”

“Probably the Justice Department,” said Howard. “The KGB showed me psychological studies that had been prepared by the U.S. government saying that I was suicidal. That would have been CIA.”

“Ames?”

“Maybe.”

“Or the KGB could have made it up,” I said.

“Why?”

“To convince you not to take the trip.”

“Uh-huh,” said Howard. “I guess that’s possible. But I went, and they helped me with false documents and re-entry.”

“Speaking of Ames,” I said. “Why didn’t the Russians rescue him? They must have known he was under investigation.”

“Yeah, they knew he was in trouble,” said Howard. “Last September, one of my KGB contacts, a man named Batamirov, showed me a picture of Ames when we were at a restaurant on the river. He asked me, ‘Do you know this man?’ I said I didn’t. I should have known then something was going on. They knew Ames was in trouble.”

“So why didn’t they exfiltrate Ames?” I asked. “Like the Brits did with Oleg Gordievsky.”

“They could have,” replied Howard. “It would have been very easy. The KGB wanted to get him out. It went up to [President] Yeltsin for approval and he shot it down.”

I almost fell out of my chair. “Why?”I asked.

“Because it would have been too sticky politically,” said Howard. “Look, when there was a $400 million aid package for Russia working its way through Congress, some Congressman tacked on a rider saying it was contingent on the Russians giving me back! Yeltsin didn’t want another one like me messing up aid packages. It was more politically expedient to let Ames get caught than bring him here, where’d he’d become a major political and economic issue.

“And I’ll tell you something else about Ames,” continued Howard. “He wasn’t the incompetent fool they made him out to be in the American press. My KGB contacts say he was a brilliant spy, very professional.”

“You wrote in your manuscript that your KGB friends cracked out champagne when Ames was caught. Why would they celebrate the loss of such an important agent?”

“You have to understand,” said Howard, “these guys have been bashed away at for five years. It boosted their morale to be seen to have put one over on the CIA.”

I asked again about Russian spies inside the U.S. government.

“Look,” said Howard. “We have thousands of intelligence officers around the world whose job it is to recruit spies. So does the KGB. With all those people, and a big budget, do you think they don’t recruit anyone? If they didn’t, the money would stop. Of course they have spies everywhere! When I was living in Sweden, my KGB contacts told me in advance everything that was coming down on me. They said, You’re about to be detained and arrested. They knew! I’ll tell you, Igor Batamirov, the man Dick Cote met? He was Ames’s handler.”

As Howard chewed beef fajitas, he confirmed for me what he had told the Dickster: His book was the KGB’s idea.

“They asked what I wanted,” said Howard. “I said, Just give me a new car. They said fine.”

I ordered a second Heineken; Ed, another tonic. The restaurant had begun to fill up, mostly expatriate American businessmen.

Talk turned to the new capitalism in Russia, Howard’s pet peeve.

“In the old days,” said Howard, “I had a little book, and in it were special vouchers and phone numbers for getting seats at the Bolshoi ballet or anywhere else in Moscow.”

“You don’t have that any more?”

“No one does,” Howard griped. “Everything is money now.”

July 1994

My Air France flight from Paris to Moscow was a slow three hours and 15 minutes; a path that took us over Amsterdam, up to the Baltic Sea, and across Lithuania.

Lunch in Le Club class was surprisingly inedible; fine by me, I had no appetite.

That’s partly because I was on my own, in both a literal and figurative sense, unprotected by diplomatic immunity: If caught out as an illegal deep-cover spy by the KGB, my friends at the FBI would deny any connection to me.

Furthermore, the Russian legal definition of spying is purposely vague and stickier than flypaper on a humid day: 20 years imprisonment is their going rate for espionage.

(Little did I know at the time that FBI Counterintelligence official Robert Hanssen was reporting everything he could get his hands on to Moscow.)

I carried a pocketful of ideas to extend my relationship with Edward Lee Howard beyond his business with National Press Books.

Indeed, it had been determined by the U.S. Attorney’s office that—for legal reasons— a rendition of Howard should not involve National Press, but stem from a new project I would propose.

So I sipped a quarter-bottle of champagne and made a meal of Time and Newsweek.

As we descended, my mood lightened. A sunny summer day in Moscow, clear skies. The fields and lakes looked appealing from on high.

As we landed and taxied to a terminal, I looked out my window to see Aeroflot aircraft everywhere, sleek and attractive on the outside. Like Russia itself, the truth lay beneath the surface: loose seats, missing life vests; disarray and deteriorating infrastructure.

Armed soldiers watched as new arrivals negotiated drab corridors, down a flight of stairs to baggage collection, a total madhouse.

I hadn’t checked any luggage, so I aimed myself at Customs.

Two choices: Green (nothing to declare) or Red (something to declare).

But Green was closed. So I took my place in one of two very long lines for Red.

“Do you speak English?” I asked the guy in front of me.

“I hope so. I’m from New York.”

“Why is Green closed? I have nothing to declare.”

“If you have more than $50,” he said, “you have something to declare.”

“Who has less than $50?”

“Exactly.”

“But what if I did have less than $50?”

“You’d have even more trouble if Green was open. They’d detain you for having so little money. I saw this happen once.”

The Dickster was right: Moscow defied logic.

I was only ninth in line at Customs, but it took 30 minutes to reach Ms. Potatohead, who dourly stamped and re-stamped my documents in quadruplicate.

Free of airport bureaucracy, I looked around for Edward Howard, but he found me, coming up from behind, whispering my name.

I shook his outstretched hand.

Howard looked like a short, pudgy version of the actor Roy Scheider. He wore mismatched clothing: red and white striped shirt, gray trousers, beige jacket, black sneakers.

He looked, well, Russian.

We made our way to Howard’s powder-blue 1987 Volvo station wagon with Russian tags: T9415MK.

The odometer registered 52,000-plus miles, but this rusty old vehicle had matured way beyond its physical age and mileage. Either that or someone had fiddled the mileage count.

Howard climbed behind the wheel and fastened his seat belt. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“Not at all.” I paused. “I’m staying at the Radisson. No offense or anything, nice of you to offer your apartment but I prefer a hotel and the services that go with it when I travel.”

“Okay. The Radisson’s good,” said Howard. “I recently joined their health club so I’m there three times a week. It also houses the International Press Club, which I just got into.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” Howard dragged on his Doral cigarette and started the car. “It’s open to journalists, writers, and heads of business. So I thought, what the hell, I’ve got my own business. I went in and they accepted me. It’s kind-a funny because the U.S. Embassy is on its board!”

Watching Howard’s hands, I noted his school ring (a poignant moment for me, he’s still American whatever the hell he says) and a Rolex wristwatch with stainless steel bracelet. His fingernails were bit to all hell.

As Howard swung into airport traffic, he mentioned that FBI Director Louis Freeh had visited Moscow two weeks earlier.

“I tried to get a photograph of him for my book,” said Howard.

As if any such pic would add relevance to his book.

“I stood watching outside Lyubianka when he visited,” Howard rambled on. “But he didn’t stop to talk to reporters, he rushed straight in. Later I found out why: his visit upset a lot of hardliners. So he was asked to keep a low profile.”

My sense of Howard at this point: Off-kilter.

Howard struggled against other motorists to merge onto a main road.

“That’s the mentality here,” he commented, shaking his head. “Beat out the next guy.”

“Is that a Muscovite trait?” I asked.

“No, it’s a Russian trait. I don’t like these people. And they’re even worse to do business with. Things are changing too fast here.” Howard coughed, an incessant catarrh-like hack from smoking. “Used to be, everything was based on Party privilege. Now everything is based on money. If you’ve got dollars, you can have anything you want.”

Howard seemed disgusted by this concept, not least because all he possessed had come through Party privilege from crossing over.

“Not that I was ever in love with communism,” he added. “It’s just that people here aren’t used to this. Look at all these cars.” He motioned with both hands at the bumper-to-bumper traffic grid-locked around us. “There never used to be this many cars around. People had money, but they couldn’t buy a car without the right contacts and getting on a list. It took 15 years to buy a car. Now anyone with money can buy one. And what do you get? Traffic.”

“Things are pretty ridiculous in the States, too,” I said. “You’ve been away a long time, Ed. You’re probably not familiar with all the political correctness going on. Real estate agents can’t even use terms like great view any more because it may offend blind people.”

Howard chuckled.

And The Dickster said he didn’t have a sense of humor...

“I’ve lived half my life overseas, Ed,” I said. “You begin to see the U.S. through a different light. You ever think of going back?”

Howard grimaced. He rubbed his crooked boxer’s nose. “I could beat the espionage charges. It’s all the other stuff they could put me in jail for: inter-state flight, taxes...”

“Taxes?”

“Yeah, uh-huh. I went to see a tax advisor about the amnesty they’re offering for overseas Americans. I was told I could take advantage of that. It’s the state tax in New Mexico that worries me.”

I could scarcely believe my ears. This fugitive, wanted for espionage, was worried that he hadn’t paid his taxes.

Plus he was under the erroneous impression that he should have been paying state tax all these years. I pointed out that as an overseas American, he had liability only for federal income tax, with an exemption of the first $75,000 of earned income.

Taxes aside, I posed, was there no deal that could be made for his voluntary return?

“Alan Sultan from National Press Books thinks it would be great publicity for your book,” I added.

“If they’d just try me for espionage and drop all the other crap, I’d come back,” said Howard.

“Who would you deal with?” I asked.

“The FBI. But they don’t deal. It’s really the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico.”

“Have you had offers to deal?”

“Yeah. I got a fax over a year ago saying they wanted to come to Moscow to talk to me.”

“Out of the blue?”

“Well, I had phoned an FBI guy named John H. I’d met him in Stockholm before the Swedes let me leave. I guess the fax was a result of that.”

“What happened?”

“I faxed back asking for an agenda.”

“And?”

“They faxed me saying they wouldn’t give me an agenda.”

“Then?”

“Nothing,” said Howard. “My KGB contacts said ‘Why bother?’ So when the FBI didn’t give me an agenda I never faxed back.”

“Screw the KGB,” I said. “They have a vested interest in you staying here. If this guy [John H] wants to come to Moscow to talk, what have you got to lose?”

“It’s just boondoggle,” said Howard. “Those guys like taking trips. They’ll come all this way not to deal.”

“You’ve still got nothing to lose,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, I guess it’s worth thinking about. But I don’t think the Russians would be too happy.”

“Screw the Russians, man. It’s yourself you’ve got to worry about.”

“I know, I know.”

Howard steered into the Radisson-Slavyanskaya’s forecourt. For a new luxury hotel, it was ugly as sin.

Howard circled twice before nipping into a space vacated by another vehicle.

As we approached the hotel entrance by foot, Howard said, “The Russians think I’m crazy for including ***** [code name for the Black Box] in my book.”

“Why?”

“Because they say the CIA is going to kill me for that.”

“Why? It’s old news, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Howard. “But the CIA may be doing the same thing in other countries today, current applications of the same technique.”

Howard stood next to me at the check-in desk while a clerk accessed my reservation.

“I’ll put you a long way from noisy renovations,” said the clerk.

“And a double-bed,” I said. “Not twins.”

The clerk fingered his keyboard. “Can I have your passport?”

“When do I get it back?” I asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“No good,” I said. “I’m leaving early in the morning. Can’t you just photocopy it?”

“No,” said the clerk. “You need a receipt for Customs when you leave Russia.”

Howard made faces. “What crap!” he erupted seconds later. “Foreigners stay in my apartment all the time and never show their passport!”

The clerk shrugged. “I get it back to you tonight.” He took my passport, issued me a key.

Howard remained in the lobby; I ascended to the sixth floor, found my way to room 6056, adjacent to noisy renovations.

I opened the door. Twin beds.

No logic to Moscow.

I sat down and emptied my head, scribbling notes about my conversation with Howard in handwriting so illegible, I could barely make sense of it. Poor penmanship is much less incriminating than encryption.

June 1994

FBI Special Agent John H phoned me just past six p.m. next day, Wednesday, June 1st. “I’m here.”

“And it’s not even raining,” I said.

“Of course not. Because I brought an umbrella this time! I’m at the Holiday Inn Bethesda, couldn’t get into Chevy Chase.”

“Let’s have dinner at Houston’s. It’s walking distance from your hotel.”

Thirty minutes later, John H and I nailed a booth.

“Let’s start like this,” I said. “If we didn’t know each other, would you be aware that my ghostwriter just spent a week in Moscow with Ed Howard?”

John H shook his head. “We’d have no way of knowing.”

“The reason I ask is, Howard was convinced The Dickster would be met at Dulles by G-men. So I’m wondering if you should contact Cote lest Howard think something was amiss because The Dickster was not met. But only,” I added, “if it would have been your natural inclination to do this.”

“No, it wouldn’t be,” said John H. “Because we wouldn’t have known about him.”

“Okay. I just wanted to be sure of our moves.” I paused. “Howard is really pissed off at you guys.”

“Oh, no,” said John H in mock horror.

“Yeah, that thing you did to Larissa? Howard says no more mister nice guy.“

“Oh, I see!” John H chuckled.

“Howard says he’s never coming back. No deals, no compromises. He thinks of himself as Russian.”

Over prime rib, I ran through my notes.

John H was alternately intrigued and amused.

The photographs, especially, riveted his attention: Howard and the manhole cover, Igor Batamirov, George Blake.

To a counterintelligence officer, it was a treasure trove.

“Here’s what’s happening,” said John H. “Bob G [assistant U.S. Attorney] is flying in tonight. My boss Jim S is flying in tomorrow. The U.S. Attorney for New Mexico is here, too.”

“Jeez,” I said. “Sounds like a convention.”

“It will be,” he replied. “On Friday morning we have a meeting downtown. The four of us, plus about ten others, including the Assistant FBI Director for National Security and the Deputy Attorney General.”

⁂

I presented myself at John H’s room, 1406, at 9:30 next morning. Bob G arrived a few minutes later in blue slacks and a short-sleeve madras shirt.

I retold The Dickster’s tale and did a show-and-tell with his photographs, including some photos Howard had Fedexed me a few weeks earlier.

These also showed a manhole cover, labeled in Howard’s own handwriting with the codename (still classified) of the operation (still classified) to which the manhole cover was associated.

John H was gob-smacked.

“This is evidence,” he said. “The codename, *****, is secret. He’s written it here, sent it to you and even signed his initials.”

Bob G said he had loved the idea of inserting a ghostwriter into the process: Cote would make a great witness, he said, not least because he had been unwitting to what was really going on.

“That was pretty good,” said Bob G. “You’ve put this writer in front of you as a shield.”

“A cut-out,” I said.

The three of us met Supervisory Special Agent Jim S at O’Donnell’s, a Bethesda seafood restaurant.

Jim S had learned his lesson about meetings with me. He’d packed a pair of blue jeans, which he wore with a dark knit shirt, Timberland deck shoes, no socks.

“I have a question,” I said, looking over my menu. “If I hadn’t showed up with Howard’s book proposal nine months ago, would you still not know about it?”

“We wouldn’t know,” said John H.

“You mean not one person has called the FBI in all these months?”

By this time, Safe House by Edward Lee Howard had been featured as a forthcoming title in a catalog produced by National Book Network, the distributors for National Press, and had been sent to thousands of booksellers, libraries, and media organizations around the country.

John H shook his head. “Not a-one.”

“People assume we know everything,” said Bob G. “If only they knew the truth. We’re too busy having meetings, fighting political battles.”

John H phoned me at three o’clock the next day when the big pow-wow at Headquarters concluded.

Bob G’s pitch had been well received.

Bottom-line: The Big Cheese Family green-lighted our proposal for me to travel to Russia and meet Edward Lee Howard on his turf.

May 1994

Ten days after our spook writer, Richard N. Cote, departed for Moscow, he traveled back through the looking glass, arriving at my house in Bethesda at 5:33 p.m., blasted and spacey from jet lag.

This was understandable as he had just flown, economy, four hours from Moscow to Paris, eight hours from Paris to Washington, and had all but lost his voice to laryngitis.

He begged for a glass of milk and we sat in my sunroom.

An awestruck Cote was in his glory, if possibly out of his depth.

“I just had the most exhilarating ten days of my life!” he erupted.

Edward Lee Howard had introduced The Dickster to George Blake; they’d lunched at a Moscow bistro called Tren Mos.

The British traitor/Russian spy Blake wanted Cote’s help to write his own book (a sequel to an earlier memoir), so the Dickster now intended to get back to Russia on his own nickel as soon as humanly possible. (He never did.)

“Moscow has no logic,” Cote rasped. “At least not our logic. It has a logic all its own. You’re not in control in Moscow. Moscow is in control of you. Everywhere you go, the answer is no. I call them nyet-nyuks.”

“Slow down,” I said. “Let’s start from the beginning.”

Cote rubbed his Adam’s apple and asked for another glass of milk.

“I asked Howard the entire laundry list of questions the FBI and CIA would dearly like to ask him, if only they could,” said Cone, not realizing that the FBI did indeed ask these questions , and pretty soon they’d have their answers. “I’ll send you 50 pages of interview transcripts.”

So rather than talk substance, we’d talk color and gossip, and do this over pizza and chardonnay at nearby Melio’s in Spring Valley Center.

“Howard has a 1700 square-foot apartment in the second nicest neighborhood in Moscow,” whispered Cote. “He was able to buy it, but he doesn’t live there. He uses it to overnight in town and put up business associates.”

It was in Howard’s apartment that The Dickster lodged.

“His apartment is on the second floor,” Cote continued. “This was convenient because the elevator was broken the whole time. Two bedrooms, one has twin beds. The other is fitted as a home-office with computer and laser printer.”

I asked Cote if he thought he’d been watched.

“Not for one minute.”

But what about Ed’s security contingent? (Howard had written of a 24-hour, 16-bodyguard arrangement.)

The Dickster shook his head. “It doesn’t exist. I asked him about it. He said, ‘Sometimes I have a tail, maybe two, if they’re training somebody new.’”

“Did he drink any booze?”

“Not one drop.”

“Did you go out to bars with him?”

“Yep.” Cote nodded. “He drank soft drinks. Oh, you’ll like this: Every head bartender in every bar in Moscow is a KGB agent. Anyway, Ed just doesn’t drink. The Russian police can stop motorists for any reason. They don’t need reasonable cause. And they come down heavy on drunk drivers. Ed says it’s not worth chancing it. He wants to be a good Russian.”

“What do you mean, a good Russian?”

“Ed doesn’t consider himself an American expatriate any more,” said Cote. “He has Russian citizenship and he considers himself Russian. That’s his self-image. He’s in Russia for good and he’s going to live a Russian life. None of his friends are American...”

“Who are his friends?”

“Ed has very few friends,” replied Cote. “Igor Batamirov, a KGB colonel I met, is probably his best friend. And George Blake. I loved Blake. He’s like a big teddy bear. I wanted to put him in my suitcase and bring him back with me. And, yeah, he’s a good friend to Ed.”

“Girlfriends?”

“Yes,” replied Cote. “He has a few. Ed has an interesting perspective on this. He says his wife knows that he’s screwed around, that he has girlfriends. But as long as it’s vague, it’s cool. He doesn’t want to get into specifics in his book because then it would be un-cool. But, boy, his first three years in Moscow were wild. All he did was drink and screw every woman he could get his hands on. Igor vouched for this. But that’s over. Ed’s settled down. He’s really a quiet country boy at heart.”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely,” said Cote. “He’s sober and serious and very self-sufficient.”

“What about a sense of humor?” I asked.

“Ed doesn’t have a well-developed sense of humor,” said Cote. “If you try to be funny, he misses it nine times out of ten.”

The Dickster reached into his sportcoat and extracted a pack of color photographs.

“Ed took me to places where tourists never travel,” said Cote. “Our government,” he whispered, “spent $250 million on a manhole cover. Can you believe it? Here it is.”

Cote showed me a shot of Howard kneeling over a manhole cover.

“That’s it, the manhole cover, a quarter of a billion bucks!”

I flipped through the deck.

Howard hunched over a laptop in his dacha.

Howard picking through food at open-air market stalls.

None of the photos showed Howard full-face, but he was clean-shaven; gone, the mousy mustache, and his hair was turning gray.

“Ed didn’t want any full-face shots,” explained Cote “He doesn’t want the FBI to have an up-to-date picture of him.”

“What makes Ed think the FBI would see your photos?”

“You kidding? Ed was convinced they’d meet me at the gate at Dulles Airport and confiscate my tapes and photos.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. He’s really pissed at the FBI. Now, this is in confidence, not for the book, not for the guys at National Press, but just for you: Ed told me that his assistant, Larissa, came to the U.S. to visit relatives. She was intercepted by the FBI and forced to give testimony before a grand jury. She was upset. Ed was livid. He’s had it with the FBI.

“As for Joel Joseph’s suggestion about making a deal?" Cote continued. “Ed says no deal-making. He says no truce with the FBI, no compromises. His attitude is, you won’t leave me alone, so fuck you, you want to play games? I’ll reveal everything I know.”

I perused Cote’s other photos:

1) The Dickster with Colonel Igor Batamirov, a senior KGB officer whom the powers-that-be in Moscow had wheeled out for his first-ever interview with a Western writer. (When Howard first arrived in Moscow, it was Batamirov who met him at the airport.)

2) The Dickster with George Blake.

“George didn’t really want a photo taken of him,” said Cote. “Nobody knows what he looks like any more. I assured him it won’t be used in the book.”

This much was obvious: The Russians had put on a good show for The Dickster. They were very much behind Howard’s book.

“Ames?” I asked.

“In the transcripts.”

“Tell me something,” I prodded, mindful that Special Agent John H would fly in from Albuquerque next day to be briefed by me on my spook writer’s trip.

“Okay.” Cote sipped water. “I put to Ed the Yurchenko theory, that Yurchenko was KGB stage-managed to take the heat off Ames at Ed’s expense. Ed doesn’t buy that. He believes Yurchenko was genuine and knew that Howard was on a KGB target list because they knew he was unhappy and ripe for an approach.

“So Yurchenko gave his debriefers hints about whom the KGB might target, the FBI ran with that, pinpointing Howard, and they assumed the worst because they knew the KGB had been getting secrets from someone, from Ames.

“Ed says the FBI are gradually discovering that things they thought the KGB had gotten from him had really come from Ames.”

“Do you believe him?” I asked.

“Look, I was in the Air Force,” said Cote. “I had a minor clearance. And I was taught, if something is stamped secret, it’s secret. It doesn’t matter if the Russians already know about it. It’s illegal to tell anyone. Period. Clearly, Ed has done this. It’s obvious to me he has given secrets to the Russians.”

(The Dickster, essentially, just declared himself a potential witness in court against Ed Howard.)

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, this is good,” said Cote. “Ed told me that the Russians gave him a Toshiba laptop, a value of $3-4,000, to write his book. And they promised him a new car when it’s finished.”

Surprise, surprise.

Added Cote, “Ed also said they wanted him to include CIA operations he knew nothing about: CIA operations in Latin America and CIA media propaganda operations.”

(Perhaps the KGB was hoping to take the heat off Aldrich Ames by creating a distraction that would leave Howard to blame for secrets Ames had betrayed.)

The Dickster was spent. By now, he’d been traveling for almost 24-hours.

Just past 8 p.m. he set off again, bound for another flight followed by a long-sleep in Charleston, South Carolina, from whence he came.

May 1994

I telephoned Edward Lee Howard and reached him at his dacha.

In the absence of a face-to-face meeting at this juncture, would he be prepared, I asked, to engage in an editorial discussion over the phone?

“Yeah I could do that.”

“I have a list of things I’d like to discuss with you.”

“Shoot.”

ME: “You mention a trip to Cuba where you give insights into the CIA. It would be interesting to have those same insights in your book. A few pages about that would help your book.”

EH: “Okay.”

ME: “Tell your reader what you told the Cubans.”

EH: “Oh, okay.”

ME: “Another place, you refer to your relationship with Vladimir Kryuchkov. I think you need to personalize this, convince the reader just how close you are with the former KGB chairman.”

EH: “Okay.”

ME: “At the moment you come across like an angry man. I don’t think that’s how you want to convey yourself in this book. I think you need to lighten up, allow yourself some levity. Humor is the best way to make a point. Don’t hold back. Let it rip.”

EH: “Yeah, I agree.”

ME: “Now, this business about how an American court could never convict you. Yet you refuse to return. How do you reconcile that?”

EH: “I have a probation problem, a firearm conviction. And the other thing is, my life would be destroyed anyway. Plus I think some of my former CIA buddies would get me.”

ME: “Get you?”

EH: “I would be hit by a truck.”

ME: “Okay, detail those thoughts in writing. Reviewers are going to look for holes. We need to make sure they’re all filled.”

EH: “Okay.”

ME: “Good. Now, what you really need to address is the [Aldrich] Ames case. A good overview from your unique perspective.”

EH: “Right. Okay, I’ll do that.”

ME: “Do you think you were compromised by [Vitaly] Yurchenko to conceal Ames?”

EH: “What?”

ME: “Did he give up information about you to divert attention from Ames?”

EH: “Okay, I understand. You know, I wrote the first part of this book a few years ago. I was doing it for Kryuchkov. He asked me to write this book. The book he wanted was ‘Glory to the Soviet State.’ Fortunately, it never got published. Now I’m able to address these points and do my best job.”

⁂

New writing soon arrived from Howard addressing my points, answering many of John H’s questions.

Also, photocopies of his passports: one, Russian; the other, a phony U.S. passport fabricated by the KGB under the alias Steve Roth, which Howard used when he secretly visited the United States in 1986.

The package also included photographs of Howard’s dacha, which detailed the security apparatus around him.

Joseph and Sultan invited me to a meeting at their offices and intended to ambush me about producing a finished Howard manuscript (it was now April 1994) for autumn publication.

I took the offensive. “You need a ghostwriter,” I said. “Though I guess in this case, we should call it spook writer.”

“Why a writer?”

“Because Howard’s manuscript sucks. It needs to be completely rewritten.”

I explained that Howard’s manuscript lacked cohesion. Some of it was penned in 1988 (propaganda from Kryuchkov), part of it in 1990, and so on.

“We need a publishable manuscript no later than June 15th,” said Sultan. “Do you think we’ll get it?”

“Honestly?” I said. “No. Howard thinks he’s done his job. The only way to do this right is hire a ghost to work with Howard and rewrite the whole thing. You don’t believe me?” I plunked part of Howard’s slapdash manuscript on the table. “Read for yourself.”

Late that afternoon, Joseph phoned me in a state of near panic. “We can’t show this material to our sales reps! It’s awful! Do you have other chapters that are any better?”

“Nope,” I said. “It’s all like that. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you guys for three months. Howard can’t write. We need a ghost.”

Joseph responded by redefining my role as editor, arguing that the manuscript needed heavy editing.

I differed, pointing out that my accepting the role of editor had been based on Howard’s proposal, which included a section of clean, crisp sample writing, very unlike what Howard had delivered.

“Howard and his literary agent misled you,” I said. “You need to hire a ghost.”

“We have no budget for a writer,” said Sultan, who had joined the conference call. “You know what our cash flow is like. We just don’t have the money.”

I suggested that they confront Howard and his literary agent and point out that the manuscript was deficient, not what they promised; that it was unacceptable and would be rejected unless they found a ghost at their own expense to rewrite the book.

“It’s too late for that,” said Joseph.

“And we don’t want a confrontation,” added Sultan.

“In that case, there’s only one solution.” I paused, striving to increase L.Q. “The Dickster.”

“The who?” they asked in unison.

“A book doctor I know. The Dickster works fast and, more important for you guys, he works cheap.“

“Could you talk to him?” asked Joseph.

One minute later, I connected to Richard N. Cote at his home in South Carolina. I outlined our project and its pitfalls.

“Can you do it?” I asked.

“Sure!”

The Dickster calculated about $10,000 worth of work.

I negotiated him down to two grand plus two royalty points, a phenomenally low price for the job ahead.

I phoned National Press. “It’s a great deal,” I said.

But they had no cash flow, nothing. Could I cough up the two grand?

Yeah, right. I’d already coughed up more than $500 in Fed Ex, phone, and fax expenses, not to mention my time. If I weren’t working secretly for FBI foreign-counterintelligence, I’d be a world-class moron.

“Maybe I could pitch in $500,” I said.

I didn’t think the Bureau would go for this, nor was it worth collecting 22 sets of initials from various cheeses; this operation was evolving fast and needed greasing.

Joseph and Sultan began questioning The Dickster’s credits. He had authored a handbook about how to score with women through personal ads.

That’s why I called him The Dickster.

“Look,” I said. “How many ghostwriters do you know who would be ready to start immediately, who will travel to Moscow, conduct extensive interviews, transcribe them, and rewrite a whole manuscript in six weeks for $2,000 and pie-in-the-sky royalties?”

Next I phoned John H in Albuquerque. “All hell has broken loose my end.”

“Really?” he said. “What now?”

“National Press has seen Howard’s material and finally realize they don’t have a book. They’re going nuts.”

I ran John H through the new scenario:

Richard Cote enters the picture as an unwitting participant on our behalf, travels to Moscow in May to work with Howard for ten days. I give Dickster the right questions to ask, the book gets saved. I travel to Moscow in July to meet Howard for an editing session, get him busy on my own book idea (our lure) and then we’re off and running in a new direction. Literally. Someplace we can nail Howard.

No new approvals needed, all National Press driven.

National Press signed an agreement with Richard Cote, and I wrote a fax to Howard explaining this new development.

Three days later, on May 19th, the Dickster arrived in Bethesda for a working editorial luncheon at Montgomery’s Grille.

Cote was all business in a navy blazer, gray flannel trousers, blue button-down shirt, chili-pepper-patterned tie, and black penny loafers, with pennies tucked into their bands.

The Dickster was big and round and came equipped with a twitchy neck and a set of rules that kept him regimented and organized.

Over lunch (crab cakes for me, kebabs for Cote and Sultan, a chicken sandwich for Joseph), The Dickster took notes.

“Are there a bunch of defectors who hang together, play poker on Wednesday nights?” I posed. “Find out. Howard has written that he’s good friends with George Blake, the British spy. Are there others, as in other defectors? Also,” I added, “do a week in the life of Ed Howard. How does he live? We need this kind of color to bring his manuscript alive.”

“I’m a lawyer,” said Joseph to Cote. “Ask Ed if he wants to make a deal to come back here.”

Cote noted our concerns and summed it up: “I’m going to tell Ed that this is his one shot to tell his story, that he won’t get another, and that he’d better make use of it and hold nothing back.”

Two hours later, Alan Sultan dropped The Dickster at Dulles International Airport for a 6 p.m. flight to Paris and a connection to Moscow.

Early 1994

FBI Special Agent John H arrived in Washington from Albuquerque along with a thunderstorm of flash-flood proportions.

The hunt for a new mole inside the U.S. intelligence community was about to commence.

He greeted me at the door of room 922, Holiday Inn Chevy Chase and a heavy relentless rain lashed the window beside our small table as we got down to business:

John H had compiled a two-page “shopping list” from studying Edward Lee Howard’s manuscript.

Some items pinpointed contradictions about what Howard had written compared to what he had told other people.

John H suggested I get Howard to trip up and further contradict himself, thereby weakening his resistance to the truth by catching him in a web of lies.

Howard had proposed to write about the Black Box. What other secret operations would he reveal?

Howard had written of traveling to Havana and giving Cuban intelligence officers insights into how CIA thinks and behaves.

The Cubans, wrote Howard, knew of a gay female within CIA’s ranks and wanted to compromise and blackmail her. What had become of their operation to entrap this officer?

Howard had written about his chummy relationship with former KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov.

“If Ed had nothing to offer the Russians, as he claims,” posed John H. “how come he was able to get so buddy-buddy with Kryuchkov?”

Next item: Howard wrote that the KGB had shown him photographs of suspected CIA personnel for identification.

“This itself would be considered espionage,” said John H. “Will he confirm that he positively identified these officers?”

Item five dealt with a CIA operative believed to have been compromised by Howard. But Howard claimed that the Russians identified this officer “a year before my arrival.” How did Howard know that?

Next item: Howard takes the view that he could never be convicted for espionage. So why doesn’t he return?

“The answer,” said John H, “is because we can convict him. We have enough testimony. Ed knows this and he knows we know. From your perspective, Ed’s got to be more believable about why he chose to flee to Moscow if he hadn’t done anything wrong.”

Next item: Howard’s contradictions regarding Adolph Tolkachev, the Russian defense scientist arrested, tried, and executed for espionage after Howard exposed him. (Note: It now seems clear that Aldrich Ames, not Howard, was responsible for giving up Tolkachev.)

Next item: Howard’s failed polygraph. “This is the pivotal point of his story,” said John H. “He should be prepared to tell all.”

“You’d make a good editor,” I said. “I wonder what Howard would say if he knew you were shaping his book?”

(The irony of this unique situation was not lost on either of us.)

Howard had written: “The idea of running a train car full of computers and spy devices right through the heart of the USSR was something that the boys at Langley could not resist doing.”

John H posed these questions for Howard: Is this for real? Do you know more details?

“This is something that really happened,” said John H. “It’s not so important now, but it was very important back then. It’s another example, we think, of something Howard gave away.”

Next: Howard’s current drinking habits.

“After too much drink,” said John H, “he gets weepy and admits he spied.”

Next: Howard depicted himself as a faithful married man. But this was far from the truth.

“Would any of this be a problem for you to handle?” asked John H.

“You kidding? I’m his editor, which makes me a notch higher than psychotherapist. It’s my job to play devil’s advocate.”

“Good,” said John H. “People at the top have confidence in your ability to pull this off.”

He produced an envelope stuffed with hundred dollar bills, expense money for my trip.

“You’re on your own in Zurich,” he added. “Usually, CIA would watch the action, but we’ve told them to stay clear.” (In fact, the Bureau never told CIA anything.) “No notice will be given to the Swiss government. You’ve got a clear playing field. The downside, of course, is that there’s no back-up, no one’s there for you.”

Gee, thanks.

Bad news arrived next morning through a fax from Howard: He would not be coming to “the kids place” (Zurich) after all.

The Russian Government, he said, had instructed him to freeze all foreign travel until after the trial of Aldrich Ames.

Howard requested that I come see him in Moscow instead.

This, of course, would require a whole new set of approvals from the Big Cheese Family.

John H was disappointed.

Finally, the FBI was all gung-ho, and now he’d have to tell his fromagerie that our Swiss rendezvous was a no-go.

Joseph and Sultan at National Press were none too pleased either. I visited their offices to commiserate with them.

“And we finally paid part of his advance,” said Sultan. “I bet the CIA would love to see this.” Sultan showed me the wiring instruction, which identified Howard’s numbered Swiss bank account: 234-877-60T, Union Bank of Switzerland, Zurich.

I had John H in Albuquerque on the horn 30 minutes later.

“Would you like The Author’s Swiss bank account details?”

John H was gob-smacked (as they say in Britain). “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!”

December 1993-February 1994

Time for business.

National Press Books gave me a desk at which I sifted through their Edward Lee Howard publishing contract, perused a media correspondence file (letters from news organizations to Howard requesting an interview), and read his manuscript.

At noon, Sultan and I broke for lunch at Melio’s in Spring Valley.

“Wouldn’t it be great if Howard came back to the U.S.?” said Sultan. “Think of the publicity!”

Working on it, I felt like saying.

Sultan was now consumed with selling the book. “I’ve got the sales director from our distributor coming to see us. He’s giving me a hard time, something about Cold War books being tough to sell these days. But if we could get Howard to return...”

Soon after, on December 16th, I had my first encounter with Howard.

I keyed his Moscow telephone number and left a message on his answering machine. An hour he returned my call.

We exchanged greetings. Howard sounded serious and sober. I asked how much material he’d already written.

About a hundred pages.

How much more did he intend to write?”

“Another hundred pages,” said Howard.

“Sounds light, Ed. Even 300 pages would convey to only 220 book pages.”

“Hmmmm. I guess I could write more,” said Howard. “I wrote my story a couple of years ago. A lot has happened since then.”

He said he had imminent plans for a Christmas vacation in “Siberia” (his code-name for Switzerland). “I’ll be back on the 27th. That’s when I intend to start writing.”

“National Press wants to publish this book in May or June, which means we need a finished manuscript by early March. Do you think you can do it?”

“The contract says March 15th,” said Howard. “I intend to comply with it.”

“Don’t worry about spelling or grammar,” I said. “Just let it roll, like you’re at a bar telling your story over a couple beers.”

Howard chuckled. He could relate to that; it probably made him thirsty.

A few weeks later Howard’s computer disk arrived, labeled in Howard’s hand: ELH Book WP5.0.

Maybe future evidence against him.

I slipped the disk it into my laptop and read Howard’s files, about 100 pages as promised. It was rough, very rough. Not what the proposal had promised.

Howard needed more than an editor.

He needed a ghostwriter.

Although they had a signed contract with Howard, the guys at National Press had thus far withheld his advance payment, not least because they had no cash flow.

Everybody was conning everybody.

I shot Howard a fax: Your material has big problems. I’m planning to be in Monaco on business in February. Can we meet?

A Fed Ex envelope from Howard arrived one week later. Inside, a letter with this message: Howard would meet me in Zurich,

Switzerland,”13:00 hours,” at the reception desk of Hotel Kindli, which, he instructed, we should refer to in all communications as “the kids place.”

This greatly relieved Joseph and Sultan. Promise of a face-to-face with Howard suggested progress, though they conceded his book would no longer be a spring title.

“And we’re still hurting for finance,” said Joseph. “If we don’t get any, we may have to kill the Howard book. His literary agent is bugging us every day for the advance and we don’t have it.”

I phoned Howard. “Big news, huh?” I was referring to Aldrich Ames, a CIA official who had just been arrested for conspiracy to commit espionage.

“Yeah.” Howard sounded shaken and stirred. “It brings back old memories.”

“We still on for the kids place?”

“Yeah,” said Howard. “When can you get there?”

“Four days after the date you suggested.”

“That’ll be fine.”

Next I phoned John H. “You boys have been busy.”

“We sure have,” he said. “Now that it [the Ames apprehension] is out the way, Headquarters can focus on our project.”

John H was intrigued by Howard’s shaken response to the Ames arrest.

In his book proposal, Howard claimed that he had visited the United States with a phony U.S. passport under the name Scott Roth in 1986, a year after his defection to Moscow; that he had met in a Washington D.C. park with an authoritative American (as arranged by the KGB) who warned him about seeking out his wife, Mary, because she was quietly cooperating with the FBI.

“Do you remember that guy The Author [Howard] wrote about?” asked John H.

“I remember it well.”

John H’s implication: The man Howard met on a park bench in Washington was Ames.

I telephoned Howard and discussed with him the inability of National Press to pay his advance at the present time, Howard’s writing progress, our imminent rendezvous, and the American spy he had met during his clandestine trip to the USA in 1986.

ME: Is it your belief that there’s still somebody else [another spy beyond Ames]?”

EH: Well, I think that you, um, go to the last part of my trip to America, uh...

ME: Yeah, I remember that. Is that the guy [Ames]?

EH: No. The man I met in the States is different.

This tipped me off, and by extension the FBI, to an extremely important truth: Another American within the U.S. intelligence community was secretly operating as a mole for the Russians and quite likely passing them secrets.

Autumn 1993

The guys at National Press Books wanted to get moving on their Edward Lee Howard book.

I, conversely, was bent on slowing all movement until the FBI could get a grip.

Joseph and Sultan called a meeting at their office.

“So what’s happening?” asked Joseph. “Are you in or what?”

“Still thinking about it,” I said.

“We want to publish this book next spring,” said Sultan. “We need to know immediately if we’re going ahead.”

“Do you really think Howard will write a book in time for spring publication?”

“He’s already written a hundred pages,” snapped Joseph.

“Huh?” The manuscript referred to by Special Agent John H of had apparently surfaced. “Have you seen it?”

“Sure,” said Joseph. “We’ve got it here in the office. It’s good.”

Time to change gears. “Another thing that concerns me,” I said, “is the legality of publishing Howard’s secrets.”

“We’d never publish anything we know to be classified,” said Joseph without hesitation. “It’s a felony. The CIA will hate this book. We don’t want to give them a reason to jump all over us.”

“What will Howard say about that?” I asked.

“We won’t even bring it up,” replied Sultan. “Ultimately, we control the editorial content of the book.”

“May I see Howard’s material?”

“Sure,” said Joseph.

Sultan left the room and returned with a sheaf of manuscript.

I thumbed through it: neat, polished prose. In other words, nothing like John H’s description.

“We’ve got to know whether or not you’re in,” said Sultan. “By tomorrow. Take the material, read it, let us know.”

Back home, I touch-keyed John H’s direct line. “I’m under pressure to make a decision,” I said. “They’re convinced they can publish in the spring because they received a hundred pages of manuscript.”

“Did you get a copy?”

“Of course.”

“Will you mail it to me?”

“I’ve already posted it.”

“I’ll phone Headquarters,” said John H.

Next morning he phoned me back. “This is the situation: There’s a Big Cheese who needs to make the final decision. But he’s out all this week. So no decision till the Big Cheese returns on Monday. But,” John H added, “it’s at the top of his pile. You’ve got a lot of people behind you at Headquarters who want to do this.”

I played for time with National Press.

John H phoned me the following Tuesday. “There’s been a non-decision,” he said.

“A what?”

“The Big Cheese saw the memo this morning. It’s going higher than the Big Cheese.”

“Bigger cheeses?”

“Our people are putting a lot of pressure on the people dealing with the super-superiors,” he continued. “They promise a decision tomorrow.”

Next day, no word from John H till late in the afternoon. Then: “I still don’t have an answer. It has to go to the Biggest Cheese.”

“Jeez,” I said, “I thought it already reached that cheese?”

“No, things don’t move that fast around here. We work in a Unit, which works for a Section, which works for a Department... we’re lucky it’s gone up the ladder as quickly as it has.”

Lucky? I was beginning to think bad luck had gotten me into this fromagerie.

“So when will it reach the Biggest Cheese?” I asked.

“Tomorrow.”

Which is exactly what I’d been telling National Press for five days straight: Tomorrow. I felt like the baloney between two pieces of stale rye.

“It had to get everybody’s initials on it,” said John H. “And that’s done. This is a reputation-maker. But now the Biggest Cheese has to decide. He’s the one who will have to face the cameras if things go wrong.”

Bottom line: The Division Chief, the Assistant Director for National Security, the Deputy Director—none of them had the cojones to take the buck.

National Press, although going up a wall, issued me a deadline five days hence. After what I’d been going through on a daily basis, it felt like a vacation.

John H’s next word: “The Biggest Cheese has a few questions.”

“Will it have to go beyond him?” I asked.

“No. Now it’s coming back down again, to get his questions answered.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Like, should we really be doing this kind of thing,” he said.

Should we really be doing this kind of thing?

You mean, instead of the equal opportunity meetings we do so well?

If they, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had to ask, should we really be doing this kind of thing, I’d have to ask myself, should I really be doing this kind of thing.

After all, it wasn’t my job to enforce the laws of the United States and catch spies.

I related this conversation to Clair George.

“Should we really be doing this kind of thing?“ he echoed, incredulous. “Sounds like the Clinton Administration, all right. It’s over,” he added.

Two days after National’s deadline, John H phoned. “Good news,” he said. “It looks like we’re in business. The confusion was sorted out and everybody agrees we should do this. There’s just one more meeting… tomorrow.”

Tomorrow.

“Let’s say you get a go-ahead,” I said. “At what level will this be managed?”

“I’ll be the guy who deals with you,” said John H.

“So what happens,” I said, “if we’re into this and we have to move on something? Are we going to have to wait three weeks for the Big Cheese Family to approve something?”

“Well, at some stage it may involve the State Department.”

Headcheese.

John H phoned late afternoon the next day. “The meeting that was supposed to take place today is going to take place tomorrow.”

It wasn’t funny any more; the L.Q. was way low on the yuk-o-meter.

Next day, Joseph and Sultan phoned, an onslaught of huffiness.

I phoned John H. “Any word?”

“It’s very discouraging,” he said.

“National Press just gave me a final deadline,” I said. “Four p.m. today.”

“That’s fine by me,” said a dispirited John H. “I’ll call Headquarters and tell them if they don’t have a yay or nay by four p.m. they no longer have to worry about making a yay.”

Two p.m. Nothing from John H.

Three p.m. Still nothing.

At one minute to four my cell phone whistled.

“I guess it’s over,” said John H. “The latest is, they have to show it to the number two man under [U.S. Attorney General] Janet Reno. Probably...”

“Don’t say it...”

“Tomorrow,” said John H.

Turns out, the Biggest Cheese, presumably FBI Director Louis Freeh, didn’t want the buck either.

“I told them it didn’t matter any more,” added John H.

Clair George had called it right.

I faxed National Press a letter bowing out of their Ed Howard book.

Eight days later, an unexpected call from Alan Sultan. “Any news your end?” he asked.

“Jeez,” I said, “after my waffling the last few weeks, I didn’t think you guys would even talk to me again.”

“Nah, we’re not like that,” said Sultan. “We’re doing the book anyway. If you want to participate, we’re still interested. It’s perfect for you. We’ve got a cover designed. You want to see it?”

A minute later, the book cover mock-up arrived by fax.

Fate would not loosen its grip.

I phoned Clair. “Dammit,” I said, “I could get this guy.”

“I know you could,” he said. “I’ll make a call.”

(A few days earlier, Clair filled me in on what had transpired at the highest level. The FBI Director was gung-ho about my proposal but the Deputy Attorney General had given it to seven lawyers to study.)

Clair phoned me later that day: “I talked to a guy named Tom Twetten [then DDO, spymaster] and Tom called the number two guy at the FBI to tell him CIA is strongly in favor of this operation.”

Two days later, Clair called me with an update: “I just got a call from Ted Price, the DDO’s deputy. He wanted to get to the bottom of this. So I filled him in, told him all about the bureaucratic foot-dragging. He said, ‘Jesus Christ, this is one of the most important things we could be doing!’ He’s charging over to the Bureau this morning to raise a ruckus and try to get it back on track.”

Very soon after, I received another call, this one from John H in Albuquerque. “If you’re still interested, it looks like we’re getting somewhere,” he said, a tad puzzled by such progress. “I’ve been called to Washington. And I have the power to get you started.”

And that’s how (thanks to Clair George) it became my job, on behalf of FBI foreign counterintelligence, to create a sting that would attempt to ensnare America’s most wanted spy.

Once John H reached town, we agreed an hourly fee for my service. He issued me a codename, and we created an additional alias for communication purposes.

Only a handful of officials inside the Bureau with a need-to-know would be aware of my true identity.