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Saturday, July 26, 2008

Agents Will Observe 100th Anniversary of FBI

By T.J. Wilham
Journal Staff Writer
       Calvin Guymon has always been thankful his shift didn't start a day earlier.
    If it had, the FBI agent would have been in a lot of trouble.
    Instead, a different agent got the heat for Ed Howard, "the spy who got away" in 1985.
    The Howard case is one of the FBI's most infamous since the agency opened a bureau in Albuquerque nearly 60 years ago. The federal agency is celebrating its 100th anniversary today, and current and retired agents will celebrate at Kirtland Air Force Base.
    Guymon was one of several agents assigned to watch Howard.
    The FBI had launched an investigation into Howard, a former CIA spy who later went to work for the state Legislative Finance Committee.
    Agents believed Howard was selling secrets to the Soviet Union, including the identities of several U.S. intelligence agents. They were watching him at his Santa Fe home to make sure he didn't get away.
    But Howard did get away.
    He jumped from a moving car as his wife put a dummy in the seat beside her — fooling the trailing FBI agents.
    Guymon watched Howard's home the following night.
    "That poor agent watching him (when Howard got away) got a whole lot of trouble," said Guymon, who retired after being an Albuquerque agent for 23 years. "He was going to get away. He would have gotten away had I been watching him."
    Howard died in Russia in 2002 and never answered to the charges.
    The case is one of many that set the FBI's Albuquerque division apart from the rest of the country: Not every FBI office investigates espionage.
    But having two national laboratories and being the birthplace of the atomic bomb was enough for the FBI to open an Albuquerque headquarters in 1949. The local bureau was also needed to run background checks for the Atomic Energy Commission.
    Just three months before the Albuquerque office was opened, the FBI learned that secrets of how the atomic bomb was built had been stolen from Los Alamos and turned over to Russia. They identified several conspirators within the U.S. military and the scientific community.
    "Spies were always a concern for us because the major targets are out here," said Forest Putnam, who was in charge of the FBI's Albuquerque office from 1975 to 1980. "We were not a little sleepy office in Albuquerque where nothing was happening. Something was always happening."
    Over the years, local FBI agents arrested a sheriff and police chief for civil rights violations; arrested a state treasurer on public corruption charges; and negotiated the release of hostages in Carlsbad Caverns.
    "We don't get the big cases here that get all of the national attention like Enron," said Thomas McClenaghan, special agent in charge of the Albuquerque office. "The ones we do get are important to the people of New Mexico. And we will continue to get those cases.
    "I suspect as long as the national labs are here, we will continue to have interesting cases."
    One agent has been killed in the line of duty in New Mexico.
    In 1937, Truett Rowe was fatally shot by an escaped prisoner in Gallup.
    A plaque in his honor hangs in a lobby at the FBI's North Side headquarters. Rowe's nephew, his only surviving relative, is expected to be at today's celebration.