فصل 23

CHAPTER 23

THE MINISTRY OF LOVE

Until I got to Moscow, I never caught the spy bug. In college, there were rumors that a professor might tap you for the work, the way the Communist dons of Cambridge had done for Philby, Burgess, and Blunt. I never heard of it happening, though I suppose that was the idea. As a reporter in Washington, I felt ridiculous the few times I was called upon to write about espionage and its entertainments. Inevitably, someone was feeding you a hunk of fakery: a “scoop” that won an obscure political point, an alluring narrative cooked up in some embassy basement. Once I wrote a story about a Soviet defector, the wife of an embassy official. She betrayed her country and fled into the arms of a used-car salesman. She was known, in the headlines and elsewhere, as “the Woman in the Blond Wig.” On television, she wore her wig and big sunglasses. Later she signed a six-figure book contract. I knew I was somebody’s fool. But whose?

In Moscow, it was understood that we, the foreigners, were under careful watch by the KGB. People talked about other reporters making graceless exits from Moscow after having been shown eight-by-ten glossies of themselves in sexual rapture with someone not their spouse. No matter how dramatic events became in Moscow, our friends and relatives at home wanted to know most of all what it felt like to be listened to, to be watched. After it became an instinct to avoid any mention of our Soviet friends, a life overheard felt like nothing at all, or almost nothing, like a slight numbness on your forearm that you forget until you touch it. Mostly, you stopped caring. Stupidly, arrogantly, you felt invulnerable. Go ahead. Let them listen. The cold war was over, wasn’t it?

Vladimir Kryuchkov, who took over as KGB chief in 1988 from Viktor Chebrikov, tried hard to convince the world that he had created a kinder, gentler secret service. The Ministry of Love, as Orwell called it. Taking a page from Gorbachev’s own stylebook, Kryuchkov tried to “personalize” himself and the institution he represented. He described for the press his great love for Bellini’s Norma. If only Van Cliburn would move to Moscow, he said, the KGB would build him a wonderful apartment. Kryuchkov even begged for the workingman’s sympathy. “The KGB chairman’s life is no bed of roses,” he told the editors of New Times. So much work, and so little time. He gave press conferences. He fielded (carefully screened) questions on a television talk show. He met with foreign visitors. There were even tours of Lubyanka on which guides would point to display cases filled with preposterous spy equipment—telephones in the heels of shoes, things like that. Kryuchkov never mentioned that he took part in planning the invasion of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. This did not quite fit with the new image.

Without cutting his forces by a single spy or border guard, Kryuchkov had embarked on one of the most curious public relations campaigns in history: trying to portray the spy apparatus of Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov, Beria, and Andropov as an earnest government servant of legality and democratic reform. One evening, the press was invited to the Foreign Ministry press center and treated to a documentary about the “new KGB,” in which officers swooned over the food (“Can I have the recipe?”) and generally acted like the corn-fed careerists in a U.S. Army recruiting film. Kryuchkov was eager not only to gild the present, but also to whitewash the past. “Violence, inhumanity, and the violation of human rights have always been alien to the work of our secret services,” he told the Italian paper L’Unità. Although the Brezhnev era was “not the best in our lives,” Kryuchkov said the KGB acted at the time in “compliance with existing legislation.” Kryuchkov’s self-advertising was born of necessity. For the first time in its existence, the KGB was subject to public criticism. The former Olympic weight lifter Yuri Vlasov took the podium at the Congress of People’s Deputies in May 1989 and denounced the KGB as a vast “underground empire” that had been using its troops and prisons to slaughter the best and brightest of every Soviet generation since the Revolution. Vlasov, a Hercules with horn-rimmed glasses, said the KGB was the “most powerful of all the existing tools of the apparatus” and must be put under strict control of the new, elected legislature. Needless to say, such a thing had never happened before, especially not on live national television. Kryuchkov admitted he had an “unpleasant” reaction to Vlasov’s speech, “but then I asked myself: I must think about what is taking place.… He is just not aware of the many things we are now engaged in and what we are planning to do. If all Soviet people are as ignorant as he is, then many of them must think along the same lines.” After all, he said, Western reports that the KGB somehow represented a reactionary, antireform force in the leadership were “unsubstantiated.… The KGB and the army both are closely connected with the people. They entirely accept the program of perestroika worked out by the Communist Party and are ready to support it and defend it.” Kryuchkov really must have thought he was fooling everyone. There was no shame to his public relations schemes. A man of the old order, he was sure he could master the new. He had the arrogance of a man who watched television once and was convinced he understood it. By 1990, the KGB even opened a press office and put a general in charge of “facilitating press relations.” At one affair, Kryuchkov invited all the female correspondents in Moscow for an “interview,” where he treated them with all the courtliness a scoundrel can muster. Waiters in formal dress brought the ladies their parting gifts: bottles of sweet Soviet champagne and a red, ersatz-leather-bound two-volume history of the Soviet secret services, autographed by Kryuchkov himself. What did he want out of this? Did Kryuchkov expect the reporters to rush to their keyboards and tap out feature stories comparing the KGB to the League of Women Voters?

One morning, on Komsomolskaya Pravda’s front page, under the headline “MISS KGB,” there was a photograph of a pretty young woman named Katya Mayorova, the holder of the world’s only “security services beauty title.” It was a curious pose. She was making erotic work of strapping on a bulletproof vest. The article said that Comrade Mayorova would soon appear on the television program Good Evening Moscow to make “announcements” about KGB operations. It said that Katya wore her bulletproof vest with “an exquisite softness, like a Pierre Cardin model.” Beyond “mere beauty,” among her many charms was an ability to “deliver a karate kick to her enemy’s head.” I called the press center and asked if I might interview Miss KGB. I thought everyone at the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters would get a good laugh out of that. But ten minutes later a call came back, confirming an interview appointment at the headquarters of the KGB.

“May I bring a camera?” I said.

“We would expect you to,” came the answer.

At the appointed hour I parked in front of one of the auxiliary buildings just off Lubyanka Square. I gave my name to a receptionist and sat down to wait for my audience with the reigning queen. In the meantime, I noticed that every so often an ordinary person off the street would come in and shove an envelope or even a packet of documents into a large mailbox. This was where people came with their appeals and their complaints. It was a bitter reminder of what this place was—still was. I thought of Lydia Chukovskaya’s novel Sofia Petrovna, her fictionalized account of her days spent trying to get the secret police to tell her what had happened to her husband; I thought of Akhmatova’s days in line, waiting to know the fate of her son. And I imagined the scene downstairs at the end of the day, a few agents sitting around the furnace, laughing and emptying the mail into the fire.

“Mr. Remnick?”

It was Katya Mayorova, splendidly turned out in an angora sweater and a pair of tight Italian jeans.

In the presence of a KGB “press officer,” Katya answered my questions—or didn’t. She said the contest had taken place “in private” and even the number of contestants was a secret. That there obviously had never been any contest at all was, I supposed, a given and did not bear mentioning. But Katya, for someone trained in “kill methods” and marksmanship by the most feared organization in the world, was charming. She was making terrific work of this. With her combination of Miss America sweetness and a veiled sense of danger, she was satisfying some base fantasy that I could not quite identify. What? The Rosy Executioner? Mata Hari? No, she said she doesn’t “necessarily only date KGB men.” Yes, she had been getting quite a number of calls since the Komsomolskaya Pravda item appeared. “Men are the same everywhere,” she said, rolling her eyes like a true Valley Girl. When I asked her to pose for a picture, she sidled up to a statue of “Iron Feliks” Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the secret police, and cooed.

It was getting late, and I wanted to stop by Lubyanka Square outside. The city’s leading democrats were going to unveil the first major monument to the victims of the regime: a huge stone taken from Solovki, a labor camp established on a White Sea island by Lenin. I asked Katya if she would be going to the ceremony. She blushed, but then recovered with an answer that I imagined was highlighted in the daily briefing book of the KGB’s public relations campaign. “Tens of thousands of innocent KGB men were also killed,” she said. “And so I’ll go to the monument tonight. I think of it as my monument, too. All of ours.” Outside it was snowing lightly and a small group of demonstrators had already begun to gather. They carried signs saying “The KGB Can Never Wash the Blood from Its Hands” and “Bring the KGB to Justice!” Slowly, several hundred people assembled around the stone as darkness fell. The ceremony began. Yuri Afanasyev, representing Memorial, took the microphone and in a voice that rang out across Lubyanka Square, he said, “Never before has a regime spent seventy years waging such a brutal war against its own people. Blessed are those who died in the camps and were hungry and cold.” Oleg Volkov, a former prisoner of Solovki, pointed across the traffic to the statue of Dzerzhinsky and declared that the time had come for “false idols to be toppled.” Priests in dark cassocks chanted prayers over the rock. People laid flowers on the stone and wept. Others carried candles and shielded the flames with their hands from the wind. The cars coming around the traffic circle slowed to catch a glimpse of this strange ceremony, and the snow fell harder, and then one of Sakharov’s closest friends, the human rights champion Sergei Kovalev, warned everyone. He said what everyone really needed to hear, that “nothing has changed yet, that we the people are still down here, and they, the KGB, are still over there.” No lie was too big for Vladimir Aleksandrovich. When a New Times correspondent asked whether the KGB kept files on Soviet citizens, Kryuchkov was adamant: “Ask a KGB man that and he will laugh. You might find such things in other countries, but not here.” The “new KGB” under Gorbachev fed the correspondents spy stories as if they were bird seed, and they were impossible to resist. Even before Kryuchkov’s arrival, they let a British journalist spend a few days debriefing the defector Kim Philby. Philby, a rat forever pretending to be a mouse, did his Honorable Englishman routine to perfection, waxing on about his service to ideals and complaining about the delay in getting copies of the Times and the Independent. Actually, Philby was a terrible drunk and the KGB treated him like a pathetic dependent whose bedpan needed constant changing. When Philby died in 1988, the KGB managed to leak very selectively the time and place of the funeral. Some of the British papers played the story as if it were the signal event of the century.

With Kryuchkov, the public relations campaign widened. An official in the Foreign Ministry press department—a KGB man himself, to be sure—let me know that if I wanted, I could have “a cup of tea and a chat” with Yevgeny Ivanov. In British tabloid language of the time, this was Yevgeny Ivanov, the “Slavic Mystery Man,” who slept with “Good Time Girl” Christine Keeler, who “Coaxed Valuable Secrets” from John Profumo, the minister of war, who “Toppled Tory Government.” In setting up the meeting with Ivanov, the KGB showed a New York publicity agent’s sense of timing. Scandal, a breezy reenactment of the 1963 Profumo affair, was, at that very moment, playing in theaters in Britain and the United States. The film had a lot of yuppie appeal, what with its orgies and Decline and Fall accents.

I sat waiting for Ivanov in the dim Foreign Ministry café, wondering what this spy-novel figure would look like, how he’d behave. He’d been the Red Rogue in a story hardly anyone remembered anymore. The year was 1963. Under the tutelage of the osteopath Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies slept their way to greater glory. The war minister, Profumo, who was married to a movie actress named Valerie Hobson, had his affair with Keeler and fell into disgrace after he lied to Parliament. He fell lower still when Keeler claimed that she had also slept with Ivanov, a KGB agent working undercover in the London embassy as Soviet military attaché. Keeler later made money telling her story. Ward, her mentor, killed himself. And so on.

A rumpled older man approached my table. He moved with a shy shuffle and seemed vaguely sad, as if he had gotten terribly lost and was too embarrassed to ask directions to the exit door.

“I am Yevgeny Ivanov,” he said. “Sit down? Yes?”

In the legend of the Profumo affair, Ivanov had fluent English and public-school manners. Lord Astor liked to have him around. The man at my table could barely speak English and was very grateful when we switched to Russian.

“Slava Bogu,” he sighed. Thank God.

I told him the critics in the West thought Scandal was a pretty good movie and had stirred interest once more in the Profumo affair and the name Yevgeny Ivanov. “Your name is in the papers. You’re famous again,” I said.

“Ach, ach, why is everyone so interested in this?” he said. “Why bring up this whole dirty story again? Our relations with the English are getting better. There was just a summit meeting with Thatcher and Gorbachev. We’re waiting for Queen Elizabeth, to see and listen to her. And against this background, to stir up mud from twenty-five years ago? What forces can gain from that?” Ivanov said he had worked for the Defense Ministry “analyzing documents” until 1982 and then for Novosti, the press agency that was also a well-known center for the KGB. He was vague about what he had done at Novosti, yet everyone knew that it was a holding pen for agents. Despite Ivanov’s stagy lack of interest in the headiest days of his life, he said he was thinking of writing a memoir.

In that spirit, I asked him if he had ever slept with Keeler. And had he coaxed her to give up Profumo’s whispered confidences?

“Never, never, never,” Ivanov said. “My relationship? None at all. I never paid any attention to her. I say this honestly. Never. What kind of star was she? Okay, she had long legs, but that kind of girl exists even in Moscow.

“Some people say I gave her the task of pumping Profumo on where and what kind of nuclear weapons would be delivered to West Germany. That’s nonsense. I could have done that better myself, just asking. It wasn’t a secret that I, as a military man, as a Soviet man, am interested in those nuclear weapons and when they’ll be delivered to Germany. And they called me a spy!” Ivanov said he thought that he’d been trapped in a conspiracy that had nothing whatever to do with him or the Soviet Union. When the news broke, he said, he quickly realized that all his “old friends” in the British Parliament and the dinner party circuit would no longer talk with him or be seen with him. It was time to close up shop.

“I left London and a week later Keeler’s ‘life story’ was in the press,” Ivanov said. “I don’t know if she ever went to college, but she could never have written that stuff herself. She could not even have imagined it by herself. It was all prepared beforehand. Some sort of group was interested in Profumo’s downfall. What group, I don’t know. He had enemies and they needed material to compromise him.” Ivanov shrugged. His whole physical bearing was a shrug. He reminded me of a retired ballplayer who had ended his career on a missed shot, a dropped pass in the ultimate game. He was famous when he would have been happier in obscurity. He was there eating with me because someone told him he had to, because it would serve an interest. “I guess I may be able to travel now to Britain, but I don’t want to,” he said. “And why? Because there is so much press in England. And if I go to England, and if Christine Keeler hears I’m there, she’ll just call in the press and say, ‘I slept with him,’ once again. She needs more money and she’ll make it if I go to London. It’s just not worth it.” And so I wrote my story. Months later, Ivanov got a fat advance from some foreign publishers. He was ready to tell all. Had he slept with Keeler? Had he pirated secrets from the War Department? Of course, Ivanov wrote. Of course!

A few months later, at an interminable press conference at the Foreign Ministry, I was tapped on the shoulder and told there was a very important phone call for me. It was General Karbainov, the KGB’s press officer, asking whether I would like to meet Edward Lee Howard.

Howard was the first CIA operative ever to defect to the Soviet Union and the KGB. He had been forced out of the CIA in 1983 as a bad security risk for failing a series of polygraph tests about his private conduct. The CIA was also convinced Howard had sold out a number of key “assets” in Moscow, including one aviation expert who was eventually executed for espionage. Howard defected in 1986, a “walk-in” at a Soviet embassy in Eastern Europe—probably Budapest.

Karbainov told me to go home and expect a phone call “confirming everything” at noon.

I was at the apartment in five minutes. The phone rang precisely at noon.

“You know the cuckoo clock at the ‘Mezh’?” the voice said, using the foreigners’ nickname for the Mezhdunarodnaya, the International Hotel. “I’ll meet you under the cuckoo clock tomorrow at ten-thirty in the morning.” I said a quick okay and the line went dead. (As it always does in these stories.) So once more, life would imitate trash fiction. Or the other way around. No doubt, by arranging a meeting with The Washington Post, Howard and probably the KGB itself were playing yet another clever game of “international intelligence.” And yet it all seemed so … dumb.

On Saturday morning, at the appointed hour exactly, under the monstrous cuckoo clock with a squawking copper rooster on top, a man neither short nor tall, neither skinny nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly, tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hi. I’m Ed Howard,” he said. “Good to meet you. Why don’t we go?”

The International Hotel was the one place in the entire Soviet Union in the glasnost era that resembled Business-Class America. There were upholstered “conversation areas,” an atrium with glass elevators, shops with goods in them, restaurants with food in them. Nothing like Russia.

“I like it ‘cause it looks like one of those malls back home,” Howard said. “Sometimes I eat upstairs at the German beer place, and I like the ice cream parlor a lot.” Howard headed toward the door, walking in that quick two-step that hit men use after they’ve finished a job. He seemed nervous, jumpy. But he never ran, never hid his face. The lobby was filled with Westerners, businessmen mainly, tired-looking men who roamed the lobby waiting for the next meeting, aimless as guppies in a bowl. Possibly one or more of them knew who Howard was, if only vaguely, as a distant scandal in a newspaper story, a man who humiliated the FBI and CIA when he slipped through their surveillance in New Mexico and left for Soviet sanctuary. Possibly—possibly not. No one seemed to be paying him special attention.

How was it that a defector—one suspected of selling secrets to the KGB—could roam around in public? I asked him. Wasn’t he afraid that someone from the CIA station at the U.S. embassy here might try to grab him? Wouldn’t he be recognized by some computer-chip salesman from Tacoma who all of a sudden would point and say, “Hey you, aren’t you …?” “No way,” Howard said. “If you asked a thousand people on the streets in Washington, D.C., or in a normal American city, say Cleveland, Ohio, ‘Who is Ed Howard?’ nine hundred and ninety-nine would never know who I am, much less what I look like.” And the CIA?

“They have better things to do with their time.”

Outside in the driveway, Howard opened the rear door of a black Volga, the preferred car of countless midranking Communist Party, military, and KGB officials.

“We’re going to the dacha,” Howard said in terrible Russian, and the KGB driver, whose English was undoubtedly fluent, headed out Kutuzovsky Prospekt toward the southwest outskirts of Moscow. After leaving the main road, the driver took a deliberately circuitous route toward Howard’s place. He took every curve at stomach-turning speed and kept glancing at us in the rearview mirror.

Howard rolled his eyes.

“On the way back, don’t bother going this way,” he told the driver. “After all, what’s the point?” The driver was clearly not just a driver, but he indulged Howard with a nod just the same.

Dachaland, at least Howard’s neck of it in the town of Barvikha, was a mix of ordinary peasant huts and the soaring brick-and-glass cottages of the Soviet power elite. Not far away from Howard’s place, the notoriously anti-Semitic and unconscionably popular painter Ilya Glazunov lived in a multistory brick monstrosity; elsewhere there were KGB officials, Communist Party men, retired generals.

We pulled up to a smart, two-story brick house surrounded by a fence. There were two car sheds in the yard, one for the Volga, the other for Howard’s own Volvo. A retired couple lived in a small cottage on the grounds; the woman cooked and cleaned for Howard and the man tended the garden, growing apples, strawberries, roses, and potatoes. The couple called Howard “Ivan Ivanovich,” Mr. Nobody. In the backyard there was a guard booth where two young KGB men kept a round-the-clock watch on Howard. Inside the gate there were infrared devices to signal the presence of intruders. Howard, who also had a spacious apartment just off the Arbat in downtown Moscow, was quick to mock his landlords as poor, shiftless Russians. He pointed to the second-floor window. “They never finished the construction up there. Typical. They probably ran out of money three quarters of the way through.” Inside, the house was set up with well-made, if wan, Soviet furniture and top-of-the-line Western video and audio equipment. There were two bedrooms, a large living room, a deck, and a study. The living-room ceiling was twenty-five feet high. Howard’s library was slim: Lenin: His Life and Work, the Bible, Russian for Everybody, and a Len Deighton thriller. He said he picked up USA Today and Newsweek on his trips downtown, and the KGB bought him subscriptions to National Geographic, Money, and Computer World. To pass the time, Howard played chess with his guards or watched one of his three hundred videocassettes. In his study, an aerie that overlooked the living room, Howard kept two computers. He used them for his “economic consulting work” at a Soviet bank, he said. He also loved to play computer games for hours: “My favorite is this one, SDI,” he said. “It’s American-made software. The premise is that the KGB has taken over the country and is going to attack the West. So you fight the KGB. I always win. But my friends always lose.” In a country of general poverty, Howard lived like a pasha, mainly at KGB expense. “Oh, I’m comfortable,” he said, sounding like a periodontist trying to downplay the expense of his new rec room. Howard said he earned 500 rubles a month at his institute job and some “paltry” hard-currency commissions at the bank. He had access to the well-stocked diplomatic stores where Westerners bought their groceries. But he denied the KGB ever paid him major sums of money for information or for his simple presence as a defector-trophy.

“When I got here I had one suitcase of clothes,” he said. “Basically, when I got to work, they said make sure the boy has some good clothes. That’s what Kryuchkov said. They gave me an allowance to buy clothes. Maybe a couple thousand rubles. Also, the first three months until I could work out my situation they gave me some money, some rubles. It wasn’t a big amount. I don’t want to specify how much.” All the guards and tails didn’t seem to bother him. “The KGB is responsible for my security. They take it seriously. Sometimes I get lectures from them about why do you not take your security seriously and so on,” he said. “But it’s my decision. I made the decision on my own to take you out to the dacha today. Kryuchkov said, ‘It’s your decision.’ They don’t like it but they said I was responsible. We have a good relationship and I respect them in regard to the security they are providing.… As long as they give me the freedom to operate—well, ‘operate’ is a bad word—but the room to move around, to associate with who I want, to do what I want, it’s okay. And they do.” Howard said he was even free to make his own travel decisions. In the past four years, he said, he had wandered Eastern Europe, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, France, and Canada—“for fun.” He said he had visited his wife and son in Minnesota and even gone to Cuba. I guessed he was lying, bragging for some complicated spy-versus-spy reason. And when I told him so, he got testy in a weird sort of way.

“Cuba’s got some awfully nice beaches,” he said. “Have you ever been to Cuba and seen those beaches?” Howard was a small-town boy from New Mexico who grew up reading James Bond novels. Working for the Peace Corps in Colombia and the Agency for International Development in Peru, he got a taste for travel (and a bit for cut-rate cocaine). In 1980, when he was twenty-eight, he had a job interview with the CIA. “I must admit there was the aura of adventure,” he said. At first Howard remembered his original image of the CIA. “But then, after meeting some agents in the Foreign Service, I thought, hey, they’re human just like us. They like to party.” With his graduate degree in business administration from American University, Howard thought he’d spend his career abroad as an intelligence officer specializing in economics, “finding out what’s in people’s accounts and stuff.” Instead, in 1982, the CIA put Howard in the “pipeline” for the Moscow station. “When I told my classmates that I was going to Moscow, everybody kind of opened their mouths. ‘Ah, the Big M!’ I thought, well, I’ll put up with it and then I can name where I want to go next, like Zurich.” For months, Howard trained in Virginia and Washington, learning “dead drops” and countersurveillance techniques, putting little pieces of film in tree stumps and not blinking. He learned terms like “wet assets” (Russian terminology for liquidated spies), “honey pots” (women used as sexual lures), and “ravens” (male homosexual lures). He learned of how the agency kept the names of its “live assets” in Moscow in separate black envelopes in a basement safe.

Howard loved the memory of it: “Ah, very holy and all that sort of thing.” But then Howard failed the polygraph tests and was forced to resign. According to CIA sources quoted in David Wise’s book The Spy Who Got Away, Howard began acting strangely, phoning the U.S. embassy in Moscow and leaving messages for the CIA station chief. He also admitted later that he stood outside the Soviet consulate in Washington and contemplated “going over.” There were unexplained trips to Vienna—practically an espionage playing field because of its position in Central Europe and its former status as a divided city in the days of The Third Man.

When the CIA forced Howard to resign from the agency, they had uncovered evidence of his personal problems, especially his history of heavy drinking. When he showed up at the hotel to meet me he was carrying a shopping bag with two bags of liquor, but, he said, “that’s just for the guests.” “I think my drinking problems came from a lot of stress factors, especially when I was in the CIA,” he said. “And there were some adjustment problems here. No doubt about it. And now I am mainly a beer man. I admitted to myself that I can’t handle hard liquor. And that’s the big step. I got depressed the last time I drank too much.” It was only after the Soviet spy Vitaly Yurchenko defected to the West and reportedly told the CIA about Howard that the CIA let the FBI in on the secret and the surveillance began. Howard was living at the time in Santa Fe, working in the New Mexico legislature. Trained by the CIA in countersurveillance, Howard soon realized he was being followed and watched. He said his shadows were “incompetent” and “fools.” “I’d see the same guy all the time riding around the house. I mean, really. And then I took a trip to Seattle. I see people on the flight with me to Los Angeles, then on the flight to Seattle, and then all of a sudden back in Santa Fe.” Howard denied he ever had contact with the KGB until he finally defected in June 1986. Under pressure and drinking heavily at times, Howard felt he could no longer stay in the United States. In September 1985, he made his escape. Once more he used the techniques he had learned in CIA training. With his wife behind the wheel of their Jeep on the night of September 21, Howard rolled out of the passenger door. A dummy popped up in his place. Then he was gone. While her husband began a half-year odyssey through Latin America and Europe, ending with defection to the Soviet Union, Mary Howard went through a long interrogation by the FBI. According to David Wise, she admitted that her husband had collected $150,000 in a Swiss bank account and buried a small cache of Krugerrands and silver bars in an ammunition box. She also admitted that the Soviet Union had paid for her husband’s trip to Vienna in September 1984. All of which reflected rather badly on Howard’s claim that he had never had any relationship at all with the Soviet Union or the KGB until he defected. Every time the subject of that period came up, Howard looked away and said, “Let’s please get off the subject of ‘85.” Where the United States was concerned, Howard enjoyed an exquisite sense of Schadenfreude. He was delighted with the KGB’s bugging of the U.S. embassy in Moscow and the celebrated incidents of marines romping around with Soviet spies with names like Big Raya. Howard said, “I thought it was comical, funny. I think it turned out that only one guy went to jail after all that. The rest of the guys were just normal, young, red-blooded, horny Marines. And they were having some fun with some Soviet girls. Ha! Ha!” At times, Howard acted as though the interview was a painful task done at someone else’s beckoning. But at other times he rose to the subject, especially that of his own innocence. It was strange to hear him discourse on one of the other spy cases of his time, the Walker family of U.S. Navy spies who sold the Soviets codes and other key military secrets. His views were one part gall, one part moral relativism. “Oh, they should answer for their crimes, but in the intelligence business it’s very difficult to say what is a crime and what isn’t. Maybe I’m trying to back off here a bit, but God, it’s a land of mirrors. I mean, it’s very hard to moralize.…” The long gray Saturday shoved on outside. At first, Howard played his character nicely, waxing cynical even about the KGB’s current “kinder, gentler” public relations campaign: “Oh, Americans should believe that about as much as they believe the CIA press campaign.” But as the day went by, the character seemed to drain out of Howard. He seemed to get bored with himself, bored with his story. Here was a man, after all, who was a bit player, a waterfly, in the great drama of the superpowers. And after all, wasn’t the cold war over? Who needs Ed Howard? He was no Kim Philby or George Blake; there was no romance, no matter how perverse, about the Howard case. He didn’t “come out” for ideals or fortune. He defected, and probably sold secrets, mainly out of panic and anger.

We drove back to Moscow and had lunch at the German beer hall on the second floor of the International Hotel. Howard hacked away solemnly at his roast chicken. All around him businessmen were laughing and hoisting their steins of beer and talking about their flights to Copenhagen and Paris and London. They were relieved to be going home.

Howard said he was thinking of living one day with his family in a “neutral country.” “The Soviets haven’t stopped me from seeking that alternative,” he said. “I still consider it a viable option.” In the meantime, from “a material point of view, I have pretty much everything I want.” Including free court time at the Central Committee tennis courts.

At the dacha, his second bedroom was cluttered with huge stuffed animals and other toys. They were for his son, Lee, he said. So far, Lee Howard knew only that his father did “financial work” in Moscow. “I suppose one day I’ll explain it all to him. I don’t know at what age, but I will,” Howard said. “He’ll evaluate the situation against what he knows of me as a person, whether I’ve treated him well, whether I’ve raised him well, whether I love him. And eventually, after the shock, I think it will settle down into a relationship. I mean, you look at Kim Philby’s sons. They used to visit him here regularly. They came to his funeral and everything.” Finally, Edward Lee Howard had nothing more to say. It was time to go back to the dacha. “I suppose they’ll call tonight and ask how it went,” he said. They probably already knew. But why did they care? I called a few days later and Howard was stone drunk. He had no idea who I was.

Sakharov had always said that compared to the hierarchy of the Communist Party, the men of the KGB were relatively honest and well educated, even a possible breeding ground for reformist tendencies. KGB analysts and agents, he reasoned, traveled and read widely, and they knew far better than anyone else the true picture of desperation within Soviet borders and the realities beyond them. Sakharov’s thinking made sense, but it did not hit home with me until I spent a Saturday at the October movie theater on Kalinin Prospekt where the liberal wing of the Party, Democratic Platform, was holding its founding congress.

All morning the speeches had been predictable and by predictable people. By June 1990, with the Twenty-eighth Party Congress just weeks away, it was no longer a novelty that there were democrats in the Party. In fact, in Russia, most of the key reform leaders were still Party members, including Yeltsin. But an odd thing happened. One of the Democratic Platform leaders asked everyone to pay special attention because a special guest—Oleg Danilovich Kalugin, a former major general of the KGB—had decided to speak. Kalugin had the razor-sharp features and icy glare of a movie spy. In fact, he looked like a younger Zbigniew Brzezinski. His speech was untheatrical, but stunning all the same. He described his career as a KGB operative, including stints as the press attaché in the embassy in Moscow and as the chief of foreign counterintelligence in Moscow. He did not give many details then, but later he told me how he had helped run the famous Walker spy ring and was Kim Philby’s designated “conversational partner” in Moscow: “I did not get all these medals for my good works as a Boy Scout, after all.” Kalugin’s message was simple: the KGB, despite any public relations campaigns to the contrary, continued to infiltrate every workplace, church, artistic union, and political group in the Soviet Union. At the same time, many KGB officers, especially younger ones, could be called “dissidents,” or at least in fundamental disagreement with the policies and ambitions of Vladimir Kryuchkov.

“The role of the KGB hasn’t changed. It’s got a new image, but it’s the same old horse,” he said after the speech. “The KGB is everywhere—omnipresent —and this is true today. As long as they are an instrument of the Communist Party, they are going to do this. We do not murder anyone on political grounds, but we can murder a person with character assassination. Thousands and thousands of human lives and careers are broken because of the manipulation of the KGB.” As a specialist in foreign intelligence, Kalugin learned to speak fluent English, Arabic, and German. As an exchange student at Columbia University in 1958, he became friends with another fellow Russian—Aleksandr Yakovlev. When he was in New York, Kalugin even scored a publicity coup in The New York Times. Max Frankel, who became executive editor many years later, wrote a “man in the news” profile of Kalugin in which he was described as a “real personality kid” who liked to sneak backstage at Lincoln Center and take photographs of the ballerinas “sometimes in ungraceful poses.” A few days after the speech, I went to see Kalugin at his apartment in Kuntsevo, a relatively tranquil district of Moscow. He and his wife, Ludmila, lived in a special KGB building, and outside there were several black Volgas ready to take their charges to work at Lubyanka and God knows where else. It was one of the more comfortable apartments I had seen in Moscow, filled with Western appliances, a brass dog, a ceramic Cinderella, and countless souvenirs from a lifetime with the KGB.

“Be careful of that ashtray,” Kalugin said. “One of the best African dictators gave me that.” Kalugin counted himself a great bibliophile. “Look at this,” he said, pointing to a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer Ward bound in red leather. “I’ve always loved him. I had it specially bound. Look at the gold lettering.” There were also spy thrillers, Europe on Five Dollars a Day, Akhmatova, Gumilyev, and a good selection of old KGB disinformation books, including the notorious White Book, which was used in the eras of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko to spread lies about the personal and political lives of the refuseniks. Moving farther along the shelves, Kalugin said that in 1971 he became the KGB’s “caretaker” for Kim Philby. “Kim had been drinking heavily. His life was going to the dogs. It was Yuri Andropov’s idea for me to help Philby. I used to go by and see him maybe once a month. I was responsible for his safety and well-being until he died in 1988. I was the first to lay a wreath on his grave.” He showed me his copy of Philby’s memoir, My Secret Life. On the flyleaf it was inscribed, “To Ludmila and Oleg, With deep gratitude and happy memories … Best, old boy, Kim.” The neighbors, of course, were “rather upset” at Kalugin for speaking out at the Democratic Platform meeting. Kryuchkov, who lived in an even more exalted building, had been angry with Kalugin for years. In 1987, Kalugin sent a letter to Gorbachev warning him that the KGB was out of control. The personnel of the KGB, he wrote, ought to be cut in half at the very least and ought to be put under strict legislative watch “as they do in civilized countries.” In 1989, he wrote an article for the journal International Life criticizing the KGB for its foreign operations. The article identified its author only as a major general “formerly occupied for a long period of time with questions of diplomatic activity.” Three months before his “coming out” at the October Theater, Kalugin received notice that he was being retired at the age of fifty-five.

What Kalugin was saying now about the KGB was no more a secret to the world than what Yeltsin had said about the Communist Party. His description of the close relationship between Gorbachev and Kryuchkov as a “bad omen” was nothing original. But Kalugin’s position gave him a certain authority, and it humiliated the men in power. Here was a major general of the secret police telling virtually anyone who asked that the KGB was still the backbone of a totalitarian state. Sure he could be playing a game. But why? What was in it for him?

Two weeks after the speech at the Democratic Platform convention, the Tass wire ticked out the announcement: Oleg Kalugin had been stripped of his military rank and decorations by order of President Mikhail Gorbachev. The military men who had ordered the slaughter of peaceful demonstrators had gone unpunished, but Kalugin was out. It was a chilling moment—in a year that was going to get a lot colder. Either Gorbachev was acting on his own or he was under pressure from the KGB. It was hard to say which was worse. Either way, the Ministry of Love was still in business.