Tribune – news, features and comment from Britain's left-wing magazine

by Chris McLaughlin

AN EX-FBI spy has told for the first time of American plans to snatch a CIA defector after luring him from Moscow.

The extraordinary rendition was only aborted when President Bill Clinton got cold feet at the last minute because he feared upsetting the Russians.

Robert Eringer, 53, a contract agent in the FBI’s foreign counter-intelligence division, has now revealed details of the operation to Tribune because he feels his old spymasters did not grab their man when they had the chance.

The CIA case officer, alcoholic Edward Lee Howard, 50, died in 2002, apparently of a broken neck after falling down the basement stairs of his Russian dacha while drunk.

But Mr Eringer is convinced he was murdered by the Russian FSB – the KGB’s successors – who he claims also poisoned ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko in London last year on President Putin’s orders.

“Howard’s dacha did not have a basement,” said Mr Erlinger. “No autopsy was conducted and he was cremated before his ex-wife, Mary, and son arrived from the United States.”

Mr Eringer says the defector was eliminated because the FSB suspected he had been turned by the FBI and was working for US intelligence again.

Mr Eringer posed as a book publishing consultant interested in Mr HowardՉ۪s memoirs.

The plan was to persuade him

to leave Moscow for a European capital where he would

be nabbed by the FBI during an airport transit.

The bait for the operation was a deal for Howard to write a Spy’s Guide to Central Europe, a travel book which would have given him a one-way ticket

to an American jail.

“He went where we wanted him to go,” said Mr Eringer. “And we could have caught him.”

But he objects to being described as a kidnapper. “Kidnapping is illegal. Renditions are done in the international corridors of airports with the consent of the country whose airport it is. And that’s how it would have been done with Howard.”

In interviews with Howard and former KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, Mr Eringer teased out a goldmine of information for FBI analysts to pick through.

He said: “Kryuchkov actually incriminated Howard with remarks confirming CIA operations Howard had betrayed to his Soviet handlers but which he had always denied. I leaned on Kryuchkov to answer sensitive questions to supposedly improve the dead horse of a book.”

Howard, a onetime Peace Corps volunteer and USAID worker, was recruited by the CIA in 1980.

His wife was later hired and both were trained for overseas intelligence gathering.

But, three years later, shortly before they were due to be posted to the CIA’s Moscow station at the American Embassy, he was fired after a routine polygraph suggested he had lied about past drug use and petty theft.

A furious Mr Howard made contact with the KGB while holidaying in Vienna in 1984 and began passing them secrets, including the false identities of a CIA officer under diplomatic cover in Moscow and information on a Soviet scientist specialising in stealth technology.

The officer was expelled and the scientist executed.

Mr Howard’s treachery was uncovered when, on August 1 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko walked into the US Embassy in Rome after 25 years loyal service as a KGB officer.

He fingered Mr Howard, and another traitor, Ronald Pelton, before re-defecting back to the Soviet Union.

There are suspicions now he was trying to divert the Americans away from a much bigger CIA mole in their midst – Aldrich Ames.

Once Mr Howard had fallen under suspicion he was kept under constant FBI surveillance.

He escaped using his CIA training by dressing up a dummy and slipping it into his car.

Then he and his wife went out to dinner. When they returned, with his wife at the wheel, the dummy was in the passenger seat and Mr Howard slid out of the car as she turned a corner.

A tape of his voice played over his phone made the FBI eavesdroppers think he was still there.

In fact, the defector had fled the country before pitching up at the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki.