On Friday morning, October 1st, 1993, I phoned former CIA spymaster Clair George.
“You know the name Edward Lee Howard?” I asked him. I knew he did. Clair had been deputy director of operations when Howard, an ex-CIA officer, bolted from Santa Fe, New Mexico, under the unwatchful eyes of the FBI and defected to Moscow.
“Sure.”
“He wants to write a book.”
“Really?”
“Truly. He’s circulating a book proposal. I’ve been invited to participate. I could meet Howard, gain his confidence and lure him into a trap. What do you think?”
“I’ll call Tom Twetten,” said Clair, referring to the current operations chief.
Two days later, I walked around the corner to Clair’s house and we strategized how best to receive two representatives from the FBI, expected presently. (CIA had quickly determined that the FBI held jurisdiction over Howard, a fugitive wanted for suspicion of espionage.)
Let them talk as much as possible, Clair advised me, so we can figure out what they’ve been doing about Howard.
The doorbell rang at two minutes to 10 a.m. Clair greeted the feebs, as he called them, and led them into his den. They handed me their business cards: Nick W, a section chief in the intelligence division, and Allyson G, a supervisory special agent. Both were polite and deferential to Clair, who opened the meeting.
“I met Robert around the time I retired from the government,” Clair explained. “He approached me as a book agent and wanted me to write a book. I never did, but he moved into the neighborhood, and we came neighbors and close personal friends.” Clair cued me to take over.
“My background is book publishing,” I said. “I have a casual relationship with National Press Books in Bethesda, which has a reputation for publishing controversial nonfiction. They received a proposal from Edward Lee Howard and they asked me if I’d be interested in editing it for them if they buy it. I told them I’m interested. What I meant was, I’m interested in seeing Howard behind bars.”
Said Nick, “We already know people who have met Howard and reported to us what he’s said. So I’m not sure how much more we’re going to get by giving you questions to ask.”
“Wait a second,” Clair piped up. “If I understand what Robert is saying, it’s not about asking Howard questions, it’s about trying to capture him.”
“Oh,” said Nick, taken by surprise. “This isn’t a Bureau decision. It’s the domain of the U.S. Attorney out in New Mexico. He has to prosecute the case, so he has to decide whether we can use tactics like this, how it’s going to play in court.”
“U.S. Marshals have something called the Curbed Frisbee Doctrine,” I said. “If we can lure Howard to the right place, we can nab him.” I pointed out that this was how U.S. Marshals had caught Edwin Wilson, another ex-CIA fugitive from justice.
“What is your deadline on this?” asked Allyson.
“There isn’t one,” I said, “but you’d better move quick or different book publisher might enter the picture.”
Allyson jotted my telephone number and said she would convey my offer to the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico.
Clair saw them out, and returned to me in the den, shaking his head. “Typical FBI,” he said disdainfully. “They only think in terms of collecting more incriminating information on Howard. As if they don’t have enough! I can’t believe it didn’t occur to them before they got here that we would be talking about capturing Howard, not asking him a few questions. That’s government today,” he added. “And it’s getting worse. No imagination. No creativity.”
Clair was pessimistic about how this would evolve. “It will sound too complicated, too dangerous,” he said. “Anyone with any clout in government is just a few years away from their pension. They never want to risk that. And wait till the U.S. Attorney hears my name. He’ll say, ‘Holy catfish, what am I getting into?’”
One week later I received a telephone call from John Hudson, an FBI Special Agent in Albuquerque running the Howard case, handled from New Mexico because that was where Howard had lived when he fled. Hudson was intrigued by my story and wanted to meet. A few days he later arrived in Washington. We spent a full day huddling over Howard.
Hudson then returned to Albuquerque to commence an arduous process climbing the bureaucratic ladder of unit chiefs and division chiefs, collecting sets of initials. No one, apparently, wanted to take responsibility for such an endeavor. As Special Agent Hudson put it: “There is a Big Cheese who needs to make a final decision.”
Hudson called a few days later: “It’s going higher than the Big Cheese,” he said, “to the Super Superiors.”
This meant that FBI Director Louis Freeh had been unwilling to green-light it himself and dispatched it to the U.S. Justice Department.
It reached one of their Biggest Cheeses, who asked, should we be doing this kind of thing?
“So now it’s coming back down the ladder,” said Hudson.
“Should we really be doing this kind of thing?” said Clair, incredulous, when I brought him up-to-date. “Sounds like the Clinton Administration, all right. It’s over.”
National Press Books set a deadline for me to decide, which quickly expired, so the FBI let it die by default, which was probably a relief to its non-decision makers.
But then National Press bounced back, more enthusiastic than ever.
I phoned Clair. “Goddammit, I could get this guy.”
“I know you could,” said Clair. “It’s the damn bureaucrats.”
Clair told me what he’d learned: The FBI was gung-ho but my proposal got stuck with the Deputy Attorney General. “It got turned it over to seven lawyers to study. I’ll call Dick Stoltz.”
Stoltz was another former deputy director for operations at CIA and one of Clair’s closest friends.
Clair called me back a few hours later. “Stoltz talked to Twetten, and Twetten called the number two guy at the Bureau to tell him the Agency is strongly in favor of this operation. I don’t know,” Clair added, “he was probably talking to a brick wall.”
But it worked. Clair’s intercession caused the FBI to rebound.
As Clair conveyed to me: “I just got a call from Ted Price [assistant deputy director for operations]. He wanted to get to the bottom of this. So I filled him in and told him about the bureaucratic foot-dragging. Ted 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.”
“He’d be better off raising a ruckus with Justice,” I said.
“He knows that,” said Clair. “He’s going to take all of them on.”
Soon after, I received a call from Special Agent Hudson in Albuquerque. “If you’re still interested, it looks like we’re getting somewhere,” he said, a tad puzzled. “I’ve been called to Washington. And I have the power to get you started.”
And that’s how it became my job, through Clair George and on behalf of FBI Counterintelligence, to create a sting that would attempt to snare America’s most wanted spy.