Talk about chutzpah. CIA operative Aldrich Ames, the FBI alleges, began spying for the Soviet Union at an extremely risky time: It was 1985, and the U.S. was unmasking a rogues gallery in what became known as “The Year of the Spy.”
Yet even though top U.S. officials were pledging to tighten security and dam the flow of secrets, Ames, it now appears, skated through seven years of snooping and high living-and possibly marked as many as 10 of the CIA’s most trusted Soviet informants for execution-before arousing suspicion.
From President Clinton on down, people are asking: How could such a disaster have happened again?
What makes the question all the more painful is that top intelligence officials realized in the mid-1980s that someone was blowing the cover off the CIA’s most critical operations and sources in Moscow. They then searched fruitlessly for years for the mole behind some of the gravest and most disturbing intelligence leaks in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, Ames and his wife allegedly were spending $1.5 million in spying profits with reckless abandon, plunking down $540,000 in cash to buy a house and snatching up a Jaguar that James Bond would have been proud to take for a spin.
But the CIA’s security investigators did not pick up these clues, scattered like breadcrumbs along Ames’ trail, until long after he had possibly crippled the U.S. spy station in Moscow and set the stage for a potential setback in U.S.-Russian relations.
Intelligence experts said the disclosures about Ames, who served as chief of Soviet counterintelligence in the mid-1980s and earned $69,000 a year at the CIA, also could force officials to re-examine some operations they had viewed as successes and ask if they were duped by their Soviet and Russian counterparts.
As critics zero in on the extent of the damage allegedly caused by Ames, some blame his ability to evade detection for so long on a secrecy-obsessed and often defensive CIA culture.
“Look, it comes down to this: The agency never wanted to find failure, much less treason, within its own ranks,” said Angelo Codevilla, a former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Others, such as former CIA Director Robert Gates, hotly disputed that assessment, saying that a spy in the ranks is “every director’s nightmare” and that “nobody was exempt” from scrutiny in the inquiry that led to the arrest of Ames and his wife Monday.
Gates and others said some spies inevitably will slip through the cracks of a system that needs to balance government security with concerns about privacy.
In part because of fruitless internal witchhunts in the 1960s and the early 1970s, the CIA normally re-examines the backgrounds-and loyalties-of its employees only once every five to seven years, mainly through polygraph exams in which they are asked if they have had any contact with agents from other nations.
Codevilla said he had heard from friends at the CIA that Ames had passed two such polygraphs while he was allegedly doing his spying. But other former intelligence officials said they had heard Ames had not been tested. A CIA spokesman refused to comment on any aspect of Ames’ case.
The former intelligence officials also said that an examination of Ames’ finances could have led investigators to him much earlier. And given the responsibilities he had for protecting U.S. intelligence sources in Moscow, they were surprised that this was not done as soon as the U.S. began losing Soviet operatives in the mid-1980s.
Indeed, in proclaiming 1985 “The Year of the Spy,” intelligence officials said that in several notorious cases, including those of Navy warrant officer John Walker and National Security Agency analyst Ronald Pelton, they were dealing with a new kind of spy-one motivated mainly by profit.
They also said they would begin monitoring personal finances as a possible tipoff to espionage, but the Ames case suggests that plan faltered quickly.
An FBI affidavit released Tuesday showed that within 12 months after Ames allegedly began spying for the Soviets in May 1985, he made bank deposits totaling nearly $125,000 in cash.
Ames also deposited tens of thousands of dollars in Swiss bank accounts while he was stationed in Rome from 1986 to 1989. Once he returned to CIA headquarters in Virginia in 1989, he bought the half-million-dollar house, invested $99,000 in improvements to it and bought the Jaguar before the CIA became suspicious in 1992, possibly through a tip from a former KGB officer.
By then, however, the worst damage probably had been done.
The Tribune quoted U.S. officials and a Russian defector Wednesday as saying that Ames’ information might have prompted the KGB to seize at least six Soviet officials or scientists friendly to the U.S. in 1986. Three of them were executed.
The New York Times reported Thursday that the Soviets may have executed as many as 10 people based on his tips. Those included the first two intelligence officers the FBI had recruited from the Soviet Embassy in Washington, as well as a senior Soviet counterintelligence official in Moscow.
Ames’ arrest also has raised new questions about other episodes in the espionage game, such as whether the defection of a high-ranking KGB officer in 1985 was staged by the Soviets. The defector, Vitaly Yurchenko, is said to have told the CIA many extraordinary things about KGB operations before he suddenly fled back to Russia a few months later.
Ames was one of his handlers, a fact that could raise new doubts about the veracity of Yurchenko’s disclosures.
