The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

house, and for more than two hours they drove around town looking for places that he could use to elude his FBI surveillance. He was planning to employ a tactic he had learned in the IO course: He would jump from a moving car while his wife drove around a corner. It was the old CIA trick of moving through the gap, taking advantage of the few seconds when they would be out of sight of surveillance. But Howard’s plan came with a twist: As soon as he jumped out of the car, his wife would activate a pop-up dummy to take his place. By the time the surveillance picked them up again, they would still see two people sitting in the car. The dummy (“JIB” in CIA parlance, for “jack-in-the-box”) was crude, but at night and from behind, it could fool them long enough for Howard to make his escape.

Back home, Howard made a tape recording for his wife to use of a call to his psychiatrist, so that it would seem as if he wanted to set up an appointment later that week. That afternoon, a baby-sitter came to take care of their toddler, Lee. Howard and his wife told the sitter they were going out to dinner in Santa Fe. After saying good-bye to his son at about 4:30 P.M., Howard drove off with Mary.

Somehow, the FBI surveillance team missed them and didn’t realize that Howard had left his home. Although the bureau had a trailer parked a few hundred feet away with television monitors scanning the area and a clear line of sight of the route out of the neighborhood, the rookie agent inside the trailer didn’t see the couple drive away. Phillip Parker, then the top deputy in the FBI’s counterintelligence division, recalls that the FBI had surveillance units nearby, ready to follow Howard. But they had to be told when Howard left his house, so they could get into place to follow him. And since the rookie in the trailer never told them he was out of pocket, they didn’t know it was time to start tracking him.

“The choke point was the man watching from the trailer, and the big mistake was to put a first-office agent there,” says Parker.

Of course, Howard didn’t know he wasn’t being followed, so he and Mary went through with their elaborate plans to evade the FBI. They ate dinner at a Santa Fe restaurant, and Howard called home to talk to their baby-sitter, thinking that would lull the FBI’s monitors, reassuring them that they knew exactly where Howard was. But again the FBI missed the signal; no one picked up on the fact that Howard was at a restaurant calling home, not inside his house making an outgoing call.

Howard drove away from the restaurant at about 7:00 P.M., with his wife behind the wheel. At the turn he had identified that morning, he popped up the Jib and then jumped out of the car into some bushes. Mary drove on, and Edward Lee Howard was “black” in the Santa Fe night.

When Mary arrived back home, the FBI agent in the trailer was stunned; he didn’t know the couple had ever left the house. But with the Jib in the front seat beside her, the agent breathed a sigh of relief. At least they were both back now.

The FBI was having greater success that day with William Bosch on South Padre Island. The former CIA officer had agreed to take a polygraph examination and told the FBI about his conversations with Howard. He told the FBI how Howard had suggested they get back at the CIA by going to Mexico City to volunteer to the Soviets. Most ominously, he told the agents how Howard had said to him, “I did it.” With Bosch’s statements, the FBI seemed on the verge of obtaining the probable cause needed for an arrest. But that could come Monday.

Meanwhile, Howard made his way to his empty office at the state capitol, typed a letter to Phil Baca, and caught a hotel shuttle van for the Albuquerque airport. Ironically, the shuttle made a stop in front of the Santa Fe Hilton—where the FBI agents waiting to interrogate Howard were staying. But again the FBI missed him, and Howard’s trip to Albuquerque was uneventful. He hopped on the first flight available, to Tucson, Arizona, and soon was gone, having successfully made the FBI’s surveillance agents look like a bunch of Keystone Kops.

After spending the night at an airport motel, Howard got on an early-morning flight for St. Louis and New York. He sat next to movie star Lee Marvin on the first leg of the trip. They chatted about the book Howard was reading—Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. Howard changed planes again in New York and was on his way to Europe by Sunday night, just as the FBI was finally discovering that he was gone.

   13   

Montreal, September 24, 1985

Chuck Medanich, playing the role of father confessor, had been bracing for the worst all the way up from Washington. Medanich had a gift for reading people, for understanding the human heart, and he knew that this CIA-sponsored hunt for the love of Vitaly Yurchenko’s life was a long shot at best.

Yurchenko had come to America two months earlier without his wife or daughter or his adopted son, and, in truth, he showed no great remorse about leaving them behind in Moscow. To be sure, he had made it clear to the first CIA officer he met when he walked into the U.S. embassy in Rome that he wanted his defection kept quiet, in the hope that the Soviet authorities would not feel compelled by bad publicity to punish his family. Having cast his lot without them, Yurchenko felt a responsibility to ensure that they were treated correctly by the Soviet authorities. Without proof that he had defected, the legalistic Soviets would have to move cautiously against his family.

Yurchenko’s dream of a new