Spy Slipup

The strange saga of espionage crossovers that has kept heads spinning in intelligence communities East and West took yet another turn last week. In this round, Washington was the victim. U.S. officials acknowledged that an ex-CIA officer had been fingered as a Soviet spy by Vitaly Yurchenko, a top- ranking official of the KGB, Moscow's intelligence organization, who defected to the West in July. The accused agent was identified as Edward Lee Howard, 33, who worked for the CIA as recently as June 1983, evidently in the agency's clandestine service. As if that were not damaging enough, officials also disclosed that Howard suddenly vanished two weeks ago, after learning that he was the target of an FBI surveillance operation. The feds, said one U.S. official wearily, "muffed it."

Howard, a former project-development officer for the Agency for International Development, joined the CIA in 1981. Agency officials refuse to discuss his precise duties, but Howard came so close to accepting a Moscow assignment in 1983 that he was given a State Department "cover" as a budget analyst. Howard's training for Moscow included details on U.S. clandestine operations in the Soviet Union.

After Howard failed a routine lie detector test, the posting was canceled, and he was fired by the agency. Howard returned to his native New Mexico and became a bona fide economic analyst for the state legislative finance committee. After Yurchenko began identifying KGB "assets" in the U.S. during a lengthy debriefing, the FBI started a thorough background check on Howard, including interviews with co-workers and neighbors. Howard was last seen at his office on Sept. 21, a Saturday. The next day his supervisor found a letter announcing his resignation for "personal reasons." It is assumed that Howard fled to Mexico, perhaps through Dallas.

How valuable an asset Howard was for the KGB is a matter of some dispute. The CIA insists that he was never a double agent, working for the Soviets at the same time he was an agency employee. In an affidavit filed last week in Albuquerque, the FBI said a confidential source claimed that Howard sold information to the KGB last year in Europe. Senator Dave Durenberger, the Minnesota Republican who chairs the Select Committee on Intelligence, told CBS News that Howard could have caused a security leak "as serious as anything this country has seen in the past." Howard's case, moreover, may be just the beginning. U.S. sources told TIME that as many as five more Americans may be indicted for espionage on the basis of Yurchenko's debriefing, perhaps as early as this week.