I was thinking it further. Howard was fired from CIA before taking up his position in Moscow, because of a security risk: repeatedly failing polygraph tests. He offered his services to the KGB, and started working for them. His behavior became suspicious and had to face questioning. He decided to escape. He did it successfully, using practices he learned in the US.
He was one CIA officer going over to the enemy. He became a traitor, and the CIA had to swallow a bitter pill.
In 1989-90 all the intelligence services in the East-Central European countries - in different ways- left the alliance with the KGB and sort of signed up with the CIA.
What kind of pill ( and how many of them) had the KGB to swallow?
I don’t know, they haven’t contacted me and I haven’t contacted them.
Certainly, this huge operation was carried out by history, itself. I
In the transition the CIA asked for the lists of agents and more. The Hungarian service refused to provide the lists. We argued that a service with a solid backbone should never do this. How reliable Allie would we be to them in the future if we gave up our agents who trusted us. We either turn our agents to work to the new direction or close down their folders altogether.
I have been sleeping relaxed ever since, that we had done the right thing. I got retired in 1990, and have no information about our service’s operations since then.
You scared me with that one. It would be a blunder to portray Copenhagen as the capital of Finland. That's not what it says but I see how you were confused. It says: 'He was airborne over the Atlantic in route to Copenhagen, Finland, and finally, Moscow.' ......... what that is meant to convey is that he flew first to Copenhagen, then went on to Finland, and from there to Moscow. If I had said, 'then Finland' it would have been more clear.
This was a very complicated case, because both Mary and William Bosch were covering for Ed. The babysitter may have been part of surveillance, yet was distracted by Mary. She came under protection of FBI and has kept a very low profile, which isn’t unusual, yet I’m suspicious of many FBI “protections.” It’s interesting that all this took place right around the same date, September 21, that my mother Ronni Karpen was assassinated with Orlando Letelier. That assassination was more than it seemed, with multiple players from multiple agencies, including DINA, CIA, FBI and KGB. Mary’s role in this is consistently glossed over. Bosch was instructed specifically to make Ed’s claims about working with the Soviets to sound as if he were under the influence of alcohol or another substance.
We have to wonder when, in the not too distant future, Vladimir Putin will address the U.S. Congress after the invitation of the Grand Ole Republican Party. Will all present stand as the Russian National Anthem is played? Will Putin manage to avoid smirking as he savours his ultimate achievement and lifetime goal - the complete subjugation of the Americanski population?
What a story..! But surely they should never let in to the Cx/I*xA someone who has a drink problem, and for godsake is taking prescription VALIUM! (and has a shrink!). Sounds like that's why their secrets were always getting out : hardly-competent hiring policies..?
They were normally quite strict about such things and he seemed an odd fit, even at the time. I think there was a 'tail wagging the dog' dimension to it. SE Division was investing heavily increating "Deep Cover' slots in the Embassy where they could bury first tour CIA officers who would work all day at their cover jobs, in full view of Soviet employees, in the process keeping the kgb in the dark aout their CIA affiliation. They had negotiated a job in the budget office and were proactively looking or someone with the right credentials. Ed had those credentials and they overlooked some personality quirks that would normally have diqualified him for Moscow. With disastrous results, obviously.
It was Librium. A muscle relaxer. Valium might circumvent nervousness when lying on a polygraph. I’m not certain that Librium would also do that.
I was confused when the story referred to Howard going to work after he had been summarily dismissed from the CIA. Did he get another job? Did they give him required notice despite their suspicions?
Also, a small typo: towards the end, speaking of Mary Howard, the word “the” was used instead of “that”.
Did Mary Howard receive any comeuppance for helping her husband escape? And why was the operation referred to as “Trumphet”?
Despite all of that he is portrayed as fairly competent both at stealing secrets, identifying surveillance, and planning an escape. Like any good story I want to keep reading to find out what happens next.
Agreed. He pulled off his escape with the same degree of professionalism that we did in Moscow. His phone call from the restaurant also showed good thinking on the fly; as did the recorded message to the psychologist making it seem like he was home after the outing. Good creative thinking and execution. Can't fault him for any of that.
FWIW, Vitaly Yurchenko was a false defector and James Geer was the CI-hating gumshoe xxxxxxx who, with help from Nosenko-loving / Golitsyn-hating CIA "researchers," Sandy Grimes and Cynthia Hausmann (provided to him by probable "mole" Leonard V. McCoy), reverted James Nolan's short-lived determination that FEDORA had been a Kremlin-loyal triple agent back to the Bureau's original assessment that he really was spying for the FBI's NYC field office since early 1962.
That's a lot to chew on. I would appreciate if you could point me in the direction of evidence that might prove conclusivly that Yurchenko was a plant. I would agree that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that could lead to that conclusion. But the guy was also cra-cra -- madly in love with someone in Montreal and thought h was coming to a new life with her, then she said no thanks and he freakd out. He also thought he had trminal stomach cancer which turned out to be indigestion. All his idiosyncrancies cause m to wonder ....but then he also seemed to suffer no major consequencs wen he went back, so there's that.. Anyway, I wouldn't mind doing a deep dive on him ....a very interesting case study. By th way my fav restaurant in Georgetown, Au Pied Du Cochon, is where he was having dinner and just got up and walked out on his handler, nvr to be seen again. The restaurant offered a "Yurchnko Shooter" cocktail after that. The other wild part of course is how they put Valery Martynov on the flight with Yurchenko back to Moscow, then arrstd Martynov, not Yurchenko.
"[I'm looking for] evidence that might prove conclusively that Yurchenko was a plant."
It's all circumstantial, I'm afraid, Michael.
The bane of Counterintelligence.
My main source is former C/SR/CI, DC/SR, and Nosenko's primary case officer Tennent H. Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, "Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games."
It's free to read -- just google "spy wars" and "archive" simultaneously.
Speaking of "free-to-read," a few of my 280-plus free-to-read articles on Substack are about (or at least mention) Yurchenko.
Here's one of them:
. . . . . . . .
The following is an excerpt from the WIKIPEDIA article on Vitaly Yurchenko. My comments are in brackets.
At a 1999 Texas A&M conference attended by several CIA intelligence professionals as well as KGB General Oleg Kalugin, the question of Yurchenko's defection came up. Kalugin stated that Yurchenko started as a real defector, then changed his mind and redefected. Kalugin gave several points:
1) The KGB typically did not use 'fake defectors' because the defection would be a propaganda problem for the Soviet government. ("People were not supposed to run from paradise")
2) Yurchenko was in love with a woman married to a Soviet official and thought that they could be together in the US. This did not work out as planned.
3) Yurchenko had a stomach that worried him greatly and he thought it could be cured in the US. It was not.
4) Yurchenko's defection was leaked to the media after he had been promised it would not be.
5) Yurchenko "felt his freedom to move around was sort of limited by the CIA".
Yurchenko apparently thought the KGB might treat him well because of the cases of recent re-defectors like Betov and Chebatriov.
My comments:
At the conclusion of Kalugin’s remarks at the Texas A&M conference, KGB expert Allen Weismann had this exchange with him:
Weinstein: "I’ve just listened to Oleg’s twelve reasons for the redefection of Yurchenko, and it has opened my mind on this one again, at least each one of them sounds in its own way somewhat persuasive, but I don’t know. I don’t know. You obviously have thought about this a lot yourself, and it may be that there is still something you don’t want to tell us."
Kalugin: "Why should I try to fool you?"
Weinstein: "Why not?"
Weinstein was right to question the loyalty of naturalized U.S. citizen Kalugin. After all, he claims, as did Yurchenko, that KGB false-defector Yuri Nosenko was a true defector and has said that former Nosenko case officer Tennent H. Bagley’s anti-Nosenko book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games, was “absurd trash.”
(You can read Bagley’s Yale University Press book for free by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.)
What’s interesting is that a lot of what Kalugin has said over the years is true — even Bagley quoted him from time to time — which reminds me of what James Angleton once said:
“A good double agent will tell you 98% truth and 2% lies, and really mess you up, boy” (or words to that effect).
During his short stay in the U.S., Yurchenko “betrayed” KGB spies Ronald Pelton and Edward Howard, whom Bagley points out in Spy Wars were already of no more use to the KGB.
Howard Blum, in his book The Spy Who Knew Too Much, says when Yurchenko was working under diplomatic cover at the Soviet Embassy in Washington in 1975 he was handling a group of KGB spies who lived on the same floor of an apartment building as probable KGB “mole” John Paisley and that he may have been handling Paisley, too.
-- Tom
PS
Here's an excerpt from Bagley's "Spy Wars" on Yurchenko:
"When sending a provocateur to the West as a 'defector,' the KGB necessarily had a plan of how to accept him back when his mission was completed. In the 1960s, their plant Yuri Loginov (mentioned in an earlier chapter) returned after betraying some relatively unimportant and generally known KGB activities. A board "reviewed his case” in 1969 and, because this was in "the liberal times instigated by Khrushchev,” decided that he did not deserve punishment. The journalist defector Oleg Bitov, after contacting British and American intelligence and publicly denouncing the Soviet system for a year, returned to Moscow in 1984 with a story identical to the one Yurchenko would use — "drugged and kidnapped.” He not only was forgiven (by a board on which Yurchenko claimed to have sat) but was promoted on the staff of the important newspaper from which he had defected. Another of their ilk, Oleg Tumanov, after twenty years of treason as an anti-Soviet broadcast editor of Radio Liberty in Munich, returned to Russia in 1986 — to be 'forgiven' because of his 'repentance.' Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the Yurchenko defection is the American debate about him. Was he a genuine defector or not? In their own books and interviews with journalists, senior CIA officials have certified that Yurchenko gave too much information to be a plant, that the KGB does not send staff officers as defectors, and that there is 'no doubt' that his defection was genuine. This avoided the embarrassment of admitting to having been duped. More importantly, it avoided the ugly demands of a contrary conclusion. It would be deeply troubling to inquire into why a KGB provocateur would have given away a CIA staff officer, Howard, and an NSA cipher breaker, Pelton, even if they were burnt-out cases. To avoid doing that, CIA was even ready to swallow Yurchenko’s absurd stated reasons for returning to certain-death or jail and disgrace in Russia: first, because news of his defection had leaked to the press; second, because a onetime lady friend (married) refused to run off with him, and third, because he learned in the West that he was not, as he had feared, about to die of stomach cancer. The incurable human penchant for self-deception was — not for the first time in history — lending a hand to hostile deceivers."
My comment: It's interesting to note that another KGB officer whom I believe was a false defector, Oleg Gordievsky, also sat on the board that exonerated Loginov.
A fantastic thriller. I enjoyed reading!
I was thinking it further. Howard was fired from CIA before taking up his position in Moscow, because of a security risk: repeatedly failing polygraph tests. He offered his services to the KGB, and started working for them. His behavior became suspicious and had to face questioning. He decided to escape. He did it successfully, using practices he learned in the US.
He was one CIA officer going over to the enemy. He became a traitor, and the CIA had to swallow a bitter pill.
In 1989-90 all the intelligence services in the East-Central European countries - in different ways- left the alliance with the KGB and sort of signed up with the CIA.
What kind of pill ( and how many of them) had the KGB to swallow?
I don’t know, they haven’t contacted me and I haven’t contacted them.
Certainly, this huge operation was carried out by history, itself. I
In the transition the CIA asked for the lists of agents and more. The Hungarian service refused to provide the lists. We argued that a service with a solid backbone should never do this. How reliable Allie would we be to them in the future if we gave up our agents who trusted us. We either turn our agents to work to the new direction or close down their folders altogether.
I have been sleeping relaxed ever since, that we had done the right thing. I got retired in 1990, and have no information about our service’s operations since then.
The capital of Denmark is Copenhagen, not Finland as stated.
Otherwise, it's a wonderful story.
You scared me with that one. It would be a blunder to portray Copenhagen as the capital of Finland. That's not what it says but I see how you were confused. It says: 'He was airborne over the Atlantic in route to Copenhagen, Finland, and finally, Moscow.' ......... what that is meant to convey is that he flew first to Copenhagen, then went on to Finland, and from there to Moscow. If I had said, 'then Finland' it would have been more clear.
Ok, I understand now. I'm not a native English speaker.
Riveting account.
This was a very complicated case, because both Mary and William Bosch were covering for Ed. The babysitter may have been part of surveillance, yet was distracted by Mary. She came under protection of FBI and has kept a very low profile, which isn’t unusual, yet I’m suspicious of many FBI “protections.” It’s interesting that all this took place right around the same date, September 21, that my mother Ronni Karpen was assassinated with Orlando Letelier. That assassination was more than it seemed, with multiple players from multiple agencies, including DINA, CIA, FBI and KGB. Mary’s role in this is consistently glossed over. Bosch was instructed specifically to make Ed’s claims about working with the Soviets to sound as if he were under the influence of alcohol or another substance.
Would like to hear more about this from you. Interesting.
Would have to be private and limited.
An absolutely fascinating account, showing how in matters such as these every detail counts. Thank you.
You have a gift, sir. I normally only skim all the Subs I'm subscribed to, but this was a fantastic account. Looking forward to more.
Is “Year of the Spy” a forthcoming book, an old book or what? I can’t find it listed anyplace. Thank you.
RO - I think Michael Sellers is sharing his CIA experience in installments on Substack. Hopefully he will clarify this.
Related material I found in the web:
Year of the Spy - Propublica
https://www.propublica.org/article/revisiting-the-year-of-the-spy
Year of the Spy - FBI
https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/year-of-the-spy-1985#:~:text=The%20Cold%20War%20was%20on,%E2%80%9CYear%20of%20the%20Spy.%E2%80%9D
Decade of the Spy - USNI
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1989/may/decade-spy
We have to wonder when, in the not too distant future, Vladimir Putin will address the U.S. Congress after the invitation of the Grand Ole Republican Party. Will all present stand as the Russian National Anthem is played? Will Putin manage to avoid smirking as he savours his ultimate achievement and lifetime goal - the complete subjugation of the Americanski population?
What an amazing story
What a story..! But surely they should never let in to the Cx/I*xA someone who has a drink problem, and for godsake is taking prescription VALIUM! (and has a shrink!). Sounds like that's why their secrets were always getting out : hardly-competent hiring policies..?
They were normally quite strict about such things and he seemed an odd fit, even at the time. I think there was a 'tail wagging the dog' dimension to it. SE Division was investing heavily increating "Deep Cover' slots in the Embassy where they could bury first tour CIA officers who would work all day at their cover jobs, in full view of Soviet employees, in the process keeping the kgb in the dark aout their CIA affiliation. They had negotiated a job in the budget office and were proactively looking or someone with the right credentials. Ed had those credentials and they overlooked some personality quirks that would normally have diqualified him for Moscow. With disastrous results, obviously.
It was Librium. A muscle relaxer. Valium might circumvent nervousness when lying on a polygraph. I’m not certain that Librium would also do that.
I was confused when the story referred to Howard going to work after he had been summarily dismissed from the CIA. Did he get another job? Did they give him required notice despite their suspicions?
Also, a small typo: towards the end, speaking of Mary Howard, the word “the” was used instead of “that”.
Did Mary Howard receive any comeuppance for helping her husband escape? And why was the operation referred to as “Trumphet”?
Great story.
Despite all of that he is portrayed as fairly competent both at stealing secrets, identifying surveillance, and planning an escape. Like any good story I want to keep reading to find out what happens next.
Agreed. He pulled off his escape with the same degree of professionalism that we did in Moscow. His phone call from the restaurant also showed good thinking on the fly; as did the recorded message to the psychologist making it seem like he was home after the outing. Good creative thinking and execution. Can't fault him for any of that.
Great story
FWIW, Vitaly Yurchenko was a false defector and James Geer was the CI-hating gumshoe xxxxxxx who, with help from Nosenko-loving / Golitsyn-hating CIA "researchers," Sandy Grimes and Cynthia Hausmann (provided to him by probable "mole" Leonard V. McCoy), reverted James Nolan's short-lived determination that FEDORA had been a Kremlin-loyal triple agent back to the Bureau's original assessment that he really was spying for the FBI's NYC field office since early 1962.
Gag me with a KGB spoon.
That's a lot to chew on. I would appreciate if you could point me in the direction of evidence that might prove conclusivly that Yurchenko was a plant. I would agree that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that could lead to that conclusion. But the guy was also cra-cra -- madly in love with someone in Montreal and thought h was coming to a new life with her, then she said no thanks and he freakd out. He also thought he had trminal stomach cancer which turned out to be indigestion. All his idiosyncrancies cause m to wonder ....but then he also seemed to suffer no major consequencs wen he went back, so there's that.. Anyway, I wouldn't mind doing a deep dive on him ....a very interesting case study. By th way my fav restaurant in Georgetown, Au Pied Du Cochon, is where he was having dinner and just got up and walked out on his handler, nvr to be seen again. The restaurant offered a "Yurchnko Shooter" cocktail after that. The other wild part of course is how they put Valery Martynov on the flight with Yurchenko back to Moscow, then arrstd Martynov, not Yurchenko.
"[I'm looking for] evidence that might prove conclusively that Yurchenko was a plant."
It's all circumstantial, I'm afraid, Michael.
The bane of Counterintelligence.
My main source is former C/SR/CI, DC/SR, and Nosenko's primary case officer Tennent H. Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, "Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games."
It's free to read -- just google "spy wars" and "archive" simultaneously.
Speaking of "free-to-read," a few of my 280-plus free-to-read articles on Substack are about (or at least mention) Yurchenko.
Here's one of them:
. . . . . . . .
The following is an excerpt from the WIKIPEDIA article on Vitaly Yurchenko. My comments are in brackets.
At a 1999 Texas A&M conference attended by several CIA intelligence professionals as well as KGB General Oleg Kalugin, the question of Yurchenko's defection came up. Kalugin stated that Yurchenko started as a real defector, then changed his mind and redefected. Kalugin gave several points:
1) The KGB typically did not use 'fake defectors' because the defection would be a propaganda problem for the Soviet government. ("People were not supposed to run from paradise")
2) Yurchenko was in love with a woman married to a Soviet official and thought that they could be together in the US. This did not work out as planned.
3) Yurchenko had a stomach that worried him greatly and he thought it could be cured in the US. It was not.
4) Yurchenko's defection was leaked to the media after he had been promised it would not be.
5) Yurchenko "felt his freedom to move around was sort of limited by the CIA".
Yurchenko apparently thought the KGB might treat him well because of the cases of recent re-defectors like Betov and Chebatriov.
My comments:
At the conclusion of Kalugin’s remarks at the Texas A&M conference, KGB expert Allen Weismann had this exchange with him:
Weinstein: "I’ve just listened to Oleg’s twelve reasons for the redefection of Yurchenko, and it has opened my mind on this one again, at least each one of them sounds in its own way somewhat persuasive, but I don’t know. I don’t know. You obviously have thought about this a lot yourself, and it may be that there is still something you don’t want to tell us."
Kalugin: "Why should I try to fool you?"
Weinstein: "Why not?"
Weinstein was right to question the loyalty of naturalized U.S. citizen Kalugin. After all, he claims, as did Yurchenko, that KGB false-defector Yuri Nosenko was a true defector and has said that former Nosenko case officer Tennent H. Bagley’s anti-Nosenko book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games, was “absurd trash.”
(You can read Bagley’s Yale University Press book for free by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.)
What’s interesting is that a lot of what Kalugin has said over the years is true — even Bagley quoted him from time to time — which reminds me of what James Angleton once said:
“A good double agent will tell you 98% truth and 2% lies, and really mess you up, boy” (or words to that effect).
During his short stay in the U.S., Yurchenko “betrayed” KGB spies Ronald Pelton and Edward Howard, whom Bagley points out in Spy Wars were already of no more use to the KGB.
Howard Blum, in his book The Spy Who Knew Too Much, says when Yurchenko was working under diplomatic cover at the Soviet Embassy in Washington in 1975 he was handling a group of KGB spies who lived on the same floor of an apartment building as probable KGB “mole” John Paisley and that he may have been handling Paisley, too.
-- Tom
PS
Here's an excerpt from Bagley's "Spy Wars" on Yurchenko:
"When sending a provocateur to the West as a 'defector,' the KGB necessarily had a plan of how to accept him back when his mission was completed. In the 1960s, their plant Yuri Loginov (mentioned in an earlier chapter) returned after betraying some relatively unimportant and generally known KGB activities. A board "reviewed his case” in 1969 and, because this was in "the liberal times instigated by Khrushchev,” decided that he did not deserve punishment. The journalist defector Oleg Bitov, after contacting British and American intelligence and publicly denouncing the Soviet system for a year, returned to Moscow in 1984 with a story identical to the one Yurchenko would use — "drugged and kidnapped.” He not only was forgiven (by a board on which Yurchenko claimed to have sat) but was promoted on the staff of the important newspaper from which he had defected. Another of their ilk, Oleg Tumanov, after twenty years of treason as an anti-Soviet broadcast editor of Radio Liberty in Munich, returned to Russia in 1986 — to be 'forgiven' because of his 'repentance.' Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the Yurchenko defection is the American debate about him. Was he a genuine defector or not? In their own books and interviews with journalists, senior CIA officials have certified that Yurchenko gave too much information to be a plant, that the KGB does not send staff officers as defectors, and that there is 'no doubt' that his defection was genuine. This avoided the embarrassment of admitting to having been duped. More importantly, it avoided the ugly demands of a contrary conclusion. It would be deeply troubling to inquire into why a KGB provocateur would have given away a CIA staff officer, Howard, and an NSA cipher breaker, Pelton, even if they were burnt-out cases. To avoid doing that, CIA was even ready to swallow Yurchenko’s absurd stated reasons for returning to certain-death or jail and disgrace in Russia: first, because news of his defection had leaked to the press; second, because a onetime lady friend (married) refused to run off with him, and third, because he learned in the West that he was not, as he had feared, about to die of stomach cancer. The incurable human penchant for self-deception was — not for the first time in history — lending a hand to hostile deceivers."
My comment: It's interesting to note that another KGB officer whom I believe was a false defector, Oleg Gordievsky, also sat on the board that exonerated Loginov.