Edward Lee Howard Edward Lee Victor Howard ( 27 October 1951 – 12 July 2002 ) was a CIA case officer who defected to the Soviet Union . Howard served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bucaramanga , Colombia . There he met Mary Cedarleaf in 1973 , and they were married three years later in St . Paul , Minnesota . In 1976 , Howard earned a master ’ s degree in business administration from the American University in Washington , DC and joined USAID . In February 1977 , the Howards left for two years in Lima , Peru , where he worked on loan projects . Although the CIA sometimes uses USAID as diplomatic cover , there is no evidence to suggest that Howard was anything but a loan officer . After Peru , the Howards returned to the United States , and he went to work in Chicago for a company doing environmental work . On March 19 , 1983 , the Howards had a son and named him Lee Howard . Howard was hired by the CIA in 1980 and was later joined by his wife , Mary , where they were both trained in intelligence and counter - intelligence methods . Shortly after the end of their training and before going on their first assignment , a routine polygraph test indicated that he had lied about past drug use , and he was fired by the CIA in 1983 shortly before he was to report to the CIA ’ s station at the American embassy in Moscow . Disgruntled over the perceived unfairness of having been dismissed over accusations of drug use , petty theft and deception , he began to abuse alcohol . He then began making mysterious phone calls to some former colleagues , both in Washington and in Moscow . In February 1984 after a drunken brawl he was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon . The charges were later reduced to aggravated assault . At some point Howard apparently began providing classified information to the KGB , possibly contacting KGB officers in Austria in 1984 during a visit there . In 1985 , the CIA was being shaken by several security leaks that led to exposure of agents and assets . On August 1 , 1985 , after twenty - five years of service in the KGB , Vitaly Yurchenko walked into the US Embassy in Rome and defected to the United States . In the following interrogations by the CIA , he accused Howard and another agent , Ronald Pelton , of working for the KGB . In November of that year , Yurchenko himself re - defected back to the USSR . It has been suggested that Yurchenko was acting as a re - doubled agent , seeking to fool the CIA with wrong leads to protect one of the USSR ’ s then most important CIA traitors , Aldrich Ames . The FBI began watching the Howards in Santa Fe , New Mexico . A warrant was secured to tap the Howards ’ phone . On September 20 , 1985 , Howard walked up to a member of a surveillance team and indicated that he was ready to talk but wanted to get a lawyer first , and a meeting was scheduled for the following week . The following night , however , Howard disappeared . As he and his wife Mary drove back from a dinner away from their home , Howard leapt from the car as Mary slowed to round a corner . He left a dummy made from stuffed clothes and an old wig stand in his seat to fool the pursuing agents , and fled to Albuquerque where he took a plane to New York . Once at home , Mary called a number she knew would reach an answering machine , and played a pre - recorded message from Edward to fool the wiretap and buy her husband more time . From New York Howard flew to Helsinki , and there he walked into the Soviet embassy . Howard maintained his innocence until his death . He only fled , he said , because he could see the agency had chosen him to fill Yurchenko ’ s profile and wanted a scapegoat . He insisted he ’ d refused to divulge anything of real importance in exchange for his Soviet protection . In 1995 Howard ’ s memoirs , called " Safe House " , were published by National Press Books in which Howard indicated that he was prepared for a plea bargain with the U . S . Howard died on July 12 , 2002 at his Russian dacha , reportedly from a broken neck after a fall in his home .