[1091-2300] BLIND RUN – Companion Dossier (PDF)

Description

In May 1983, a single polygraph examination inside an unmarked Northern Virginia facility ruptured the Central Intelligence Agency’s Soviet division. Slated for deep operational assignment at Moscow Station, case officer Edward Lee Howard failed the standard battery, admitted to petty theft and drug use, and was abruptly stripped of his badge. Left to fester in embittered exile in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Howard possessed an intact mental index of the CIA’s most closely guarded Russian tradecraft: dead-drop locations, safe houses, agent meeting protocols, and the identities of deep-cover assets behind the Iron Curtain. This declassified Companion Dossier provides the primary documentary paper trail of a catastrophic counterintelligence blind spot. Featuring reconstructed interrogation logs, polygraph chart evaluations, internal Office of Security damage assessments, and minute-by-minute evasion timelines, this dossier exposes how the Agency closed Howard’s file while the FBI failed to open one. Essential reading for historians and intelligence analysts, this forensic archive charts the bureaucratic oversights, missed tripwires, and surveillance failures that allowed Howard to slip through federal nets and become the first CIA officer to defect to the Soviet Union.