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The Shadow Dossier — The Officer the CIA Fired Too Late · The Shadow Dossier

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  the shadow dossier act i a career ended before
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  it started edward lee howard trained for years
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  as a cia case officer preparing for what should
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  have been his first major overseas posting moscow
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  one of the most sensitive and dangerous assignments
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  the agency could offer in 1983 Shortly before
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  he was due to deploy, routine pre -assignment
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  polygraph tests turned up problems. Admissions
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  of past drug use and minor theft. The CIA fired
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  him. Howard left angry and financially strained,
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  and he left with something the agency should
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  have taken far more seriously. Detailed knowledge
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  of Moscow tradecraft. including the identities
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  and methods tied to at least one valuable Soviet
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  asset the CIA was running inside Moscow at the
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  time. In 1984 and in 1985, Howard made contact
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  with Soviet intelligence and began providing
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  exactly that knowledge. Among the material he
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  is believed to have compromised was information
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  connected to Adolf Tokachev, a Soviet military
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  electronics engineer who had been secretly supplying
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  the CIA with enormously valuable information
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  on Soviet radar and weapons systems for years.
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  Tokachev was arrested by the KGB in 1985 and
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  later executed. Though intelligence historians
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  still debate how much of that specific compromise
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  traces to Howard versus other losses the CIA
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  suffered that same catastrophic year. By the
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  time the FBI identified Howard as the likely
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  source of the Moscow -related leaks, In the summer
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  of 1985, agents placed him under surveillance
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  at his home in New Mexico. What followed became
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  one of the most embarrassing tactical failures
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  in FBI counterintelligence history. Howard, aware
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  surveillance might be watching, prepared an escape
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  trick using a jack -in -the -box style dummy
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  rigged in the passenger seat of his car. While
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  his wife drove, Howard rolled out of the moving
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  vehicle at a prearranged spot and the dummy popped
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  upright, preserving the silhouette of a passenger
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  and buying him precious minutes before the surveillance
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  team realized he was gone. Act 4. A Life in Moscow.
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  Howard made his way out of the country and eventually
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  surfaced in the Soviet Union, becoming one of
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  the few American CIA officers. to defect outright
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  to Moscow during the Cold War. He lived there
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  under KGB protection for the rest of his life,
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  giving occasional interviews to Western journalists
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  but never facing American justice. He died in
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  Moscow in 2002, reportedly from a fall at his
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  home, still formally wanted by the United States.
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  The case became a cautionary tale inside the
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  CIA about the dangers of firing an officer with
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  sensitive knowledge without adequately managing
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  the risk of what he might do next. A lesson learned,
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  as so often in this file, only after the damage
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  was already done. This concludes declassified
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  file number 071 of the Shadow Dossier. The officer
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  of the CIA fired too late. What dangerous secrets
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  await in our next file? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts,
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  Spotify, RSS .com, and YouTube so you never miss
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  an official declassification. This is the Shadow
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  Dossier. Thank you for listening.