Howard Edward Lee

Genus. in 1951 in Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA. After high school, he enrolled in economics and international trade at the University of Texas, graduating early and with honors in May 1972. He worked briefly in Ireland for Exxon Corp. before accepting an offer from the American Peace Corps to travel to Colombia as a consultant. small company. There he met his future wife Mary, also a Peace Corps volunteer, in 1973. In 1975, he returned to the United States, earned a master's degree in business management, and again went to Latin America, this time to Peru, where he worked for the American Agency for International Development. In 1979 he returned to the USA. In search of work, he sent his resume to the addresses of various companies and organizations. In early 1980, he was contacted by CIA personnel officers who invited him for an interview. After passing numerous tests and commissions - trustworthiness, medical, psychological, lie detector - Howard was found fit to work in intelligence.
28.01. 1981 Enlisted in the staff of the CIA Directorate of Operations, where he was assigned to the USSR and Eastern Europe department, where he began training as a future operational officer of the CIA station in Moscow. In the spring of 1983, during a mandatory lie detector test, it turned out that he had hidden his addiction to alcohol, drugs and his penchant for fraud. In May 1983, he was fired from the CIA. However, he learned a lot of valuable information about the methods of its activities, and was also acquainted with the list of pseudonyms of the main Soviet agents recruited by the CIA. In September 1984 (according to another version, at the beginning of 1985) he secretly went to Austria, where he approached the Soviet embassy offering his services. For the KGB, he turned out to be an extremely valuable acquisition, since he told what he knew about CIA operations against the USSR, revealed the methods of operational work of the CIA in the USSR, informed about the methods used to conduct technical intelligence, and spoke about the so-called active activities of the CIA. But most importantly, he named the pseudonyms of several important CIA agents in the USSR, indicated how communication was maintained with them and how much they received for their work. Thanks to information received from Howard, several American intelligence operations were stopped in the USSR. But the biggest success of the KGB was the arrest of Adolf Georgievich Tolkachev, the leading designer of the Moscow Research Institute of Radio Engineering. The work with Howard was personally supervised by the head of the KGB PGU Vladimir Kryuchkov. However, Howard soon found himself under suspicion from the American intelligence services. Realizing that he would soon be arrested, Howard decided on a daring escape. 21.09. 1985 flew to Helsinki via New York and Copenhagen. There he was met by KGB officers working at the Soviet embassy, ​​who secretly transported him to the Soviet Union in the trunk of an embassy car. In Moscow they settled in a safe house, and later in the closed village of Zhukovo, 40 kilometers near Moscow. 08/07/1986 The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR granted him the right to reside in the USSR for political reasons.” Died 12.07. 2002 at his dacha in Zhukovka near Moscow.