As the investigators first began to focus their attention on the possibility that Rick Ames was a mole for Moscow, he received a new and fascinating assignment. He was ordered to help finish off the KGB.
The Soviet intelligence service had been gravely wounded by its own hand. On the afternoon of August 18, 1991, its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had tried to take over the Soviet Union. His coup had lasted less than a hundred hours. When it was done with, Kryuchkov had been placed under arrest and the people of Moscow were storming KGB headquarters and painting swastikas on its walls.
This was the spymaster to whom Rick Ames had pledged his allegiance and who had worked so hard to protect him by brilliantly deceiving the CIA.
Kryuchkov had planned the coup for months, gathering support among the old regime’s hard-line Communists. He had stirred up old fears, warning the Soviet legislature that the CIA was plotting “the pacification and even the occupation” of the Soviet Union—and as proof pulling out an old report he had written in 1977 entitled C.I.A. Plans to Recruit Agents Among Soviet Citizens, which detailed the Agency’s master plan to destroy the motherland.
Kryuchkov had been convinced that the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a deluded rabble-rouser who was hell-bent on destroying the system that the KGB had served for so long and that had served the KGB so well. Gorbachev had been set to sign a treaty granting autonomy to the republics of the Soviet Union. Kryuchkov had secretly organized a junta of reactionaries, fools, drunks, and generals to protect the old order.
The politicians who opposed the coup had taken refuge in the Russian parliament. Tens of thousands of people had gathered at the building, known locally as the White House. Kryuchkov had ordered the KGB’s Alpha Group, which had a deserved reputation as the world’s most brutal and efficient SWAT team, to storm the parliament. The Alpha Group’s attack was to have been backed by close air support, tanks, and troops with rocket-propelled grenades.
The Alpha Group hadn’t shown up.
A revolt within the KGB had been building in counterpoint to Kryuchkov’s coup plans. It was open and unmistakeable. Donald Jameson, a retired CIA Soviet division branch chief, had traveled throughout Russia in the weeks before the coup, and he said he had heard “a lot of internal dissent” from KGB officers “who had a realistic assessment of how rotten Soviet society was.” When the crisis had come, the up-and-coming majors and lieutenant colonels in the Alpha Group, as well as officers throughout the KGB in Moscow, had opposed the junta and refused to assault the parliament. The refusal of the younger generation to go along with the old guard had broken the back of the coup.
Kryuchkov had been arrested, and that week his loyalists had worked around the clock burning files. Muscovites had gathered at the spy service’s headquarters, shaking their fists and shouting “Gestapo! Gestapo!” That night, with the help of a crane sent by the city fathers, they had toppled the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Soviet intelligence.
The Soviet Union began to dissolve, and with it the old KGB. The spy service started losing its powers as a brutally effective tool of internal repression. Its foreign intelligence component lived on, though its new chief, Vadim Bakatin, complained shortly thereafter to the U.S. ambassador, Robert S. Strauss: “I don’t know what my future is. I don’t know who pays my salary. My government doesn’t pay it anymore.”
Milt Bearden, the CIA’s Soviet division chief, had witnessed the August 1991 coup. He had returned to headquarters convinced that he could finish off what was left of the KGB. “I got the idea that we could kill this virus once and for all,” he said. “We could get under the KGB’s skin. We’d make contact with the Russian parliament and inject it with ideas, like the concept of oversight of intelligence agencies.” In September 1991, two weeks after the coup, Bearden created the KGB Working Group, a committee of covert operators, analysts, and Russia hands at the CIA, and he ordered them to come up with creative ideas to subvert and destroy the KGB. He told one of his deputies to create a staff.
Rick Ames was named chief of the KGB Working Group.
“Milt Bearden’s charge to me was to put a stake through the KGB’s heart,” Ames said. “That’s his dramatic expression. The point being that the coming dissolution of the union and the shocks to the KGB after the coup were such that the KGB was extremely vulnerable, or was at least potentially vulnerable, to what we may be able to do to discredit it politically, bureaucratically, with the new Russian leadership.”
Bearden said that “Ames never did anything” with the assignment. On the contrary, Ames said, the CIA itself was unable to do anything with Bearden’s ambitious ideas and his own plans to execute them. “By the time I had my next meeting with my KGB handler” at the end of 1991, he said, “I told him that I thought it was unlikely that anyone was going to carry on with it.”
In the fall of 1991, the CIA was in trouble, too; like the KGB, it was imperiled by the end of the cold war.
In September and October, the Senate intelligence committee held confirmation hearings on the nomination of Robert M. Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence. They turned into a public bloodletting. Gates started out sounding like a real reformer. “The old verities that have guided this country’s national security policies for forty-five years, and thus its intelligence service, have disappeared in an historical instant,” he said. “The CIA and U.S. intelligence must change, and must be seen to change, or confront irrelevance and growing sentiment for their dismantlement.” It was a politically adept statement that had the added advantage of being true.
But Gates, as head of the CIA’s intelligence analysis division and deputy director of the CIA, had been one of the great cold war ideologues of the 1980s, and some of the most preeminent CIA analysts who had worked under him testified that he had forcibly altered their work to conform with the late Bill Casey’s biases, cutting the cloth of the facts to fit the fashion of the day. Hal Ford, a highly respected thirty-year CIA veteran, told the committee that Gates had been “dead wrong on the central analytic target of the past few years, the outlook for change in the fortunes of the USSR and the Soviet-Eastern European bloc.” Mel Goodman, who had been the CIA’s chief analyst on the Soviets’ role in the Third World, testified that the effect of Gates’s leadership had been to “corrupt the process and the ethics of intelligence.” Gates survived the hearings; his reputation did not.
That autumn, the victory over the KGB turned bittersweet. The collapse of the Soviet Union left many at the CIA bereft of their life’s work. “We were chock full of hopeless romantics who never thought we would win like this, that all of a sudden it would all fall down,” Milt Bearden said. “What we also didn’t know was that the collapse of our enemy ensured our own demise.”
In October 1991, the depths to which the Agency was falling were measured when Bearden received a startling report from one of his case officers in Bonn. The case officer reported that he had recruited a KGB source who knew all about a mole inside the CIA.
According to the report, the new recruit said that the Agency had been penetrated in the mid- to late 1970s by one of its own officers, an ethnic Russian born in the United States. The mole had handed over to the KGB information about all CIA operations in Moscow, including the identities of at least two of the Soviet agents arrested and killed in 1986. The two dead agents had worked out of Germany, as had the new KGB source.
The mole was reported to be alive and well and still working for Moscow from somewhere inside the Agency.
Several aspects of the CIA officer’s report on his KGB recruit matched the tip from another mysterious Soviet source that had launched the misguided five-year-old investigation into the imaginary penetration of the Warrenton communications center. No one yet understood that the whole Warrenton story had been a KGB deception.
The PLAYACTOR and SKYLIGHT teams immediately dropped what they were doing to focus on the report from Bonn. Milt Bearden said he had flown to Germany to interview the case officer.
“At a certain point I just stopped talking, and I listened and I watched his eyes and hands,” Bearden said. “And I came back and I said, ‘The guy’s lying. It’s a fraud. This is a guy who’s gone wacko and he’s making stuff up. He invented the recruitment.’ And there was a great sadness over that.”
The CIA case officer in Bonn was recalled to headquarters for questioning in October 1991. After a week of interrogation, the CIA concluded that he had fabricated the recruit and invented the report to enhance his career and win a raise. The case officer resigned from the CIA, and in 1992 the case was referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. Nothing ever came of it.
The bogus report cost PLAYACTOR and SKYLIGHT nearly a month. They got back on track by scheduling interviews with the top twenty-nine suspects on the BIGOT list. These included Milt Bearden, Ames’s boss; Colin Thompson, Ames’s colleague in the counterintelligence group back in 1985; and Ames himself. But the interviews almost never came off.
The FBI has a standard procedure for interviewing that includes creating a transcript listing the names of all participants—the interviewers as well as the subjects. The CIA refused to go along with that. The Agency felt it would be a breach of security to record the true name of a CIA officer on a piece of paper that might end up as a public record in a criminal trial. The Agency demanded that the transcripts omit the names of Jeanne Vertefeuille and Sandy Grimes.
Bryant angrily refused. Leaving out the names would create a false document, and that could taint a prosecution against a mole, he argued. The CIA reluctantly backed down, but the episode, a petty dispute over procedure, brought the deep animosity between the Bureau and the Agency boiling back to the surface.
Finally, the interviews got under way. Vertefeuille and Grimes from the CIA usually did most of the questioning; either Holt or Milburn usually accompanied them.
They went to see Milt Bearden. “I knew I had to be on the list,” he said. “We were down to about twenty people, and I was one of them.” A few weeks after the interview, the new Director of Central Intelligence, Bob Gates, ended Bearden’s tenure as chief of the Soviet division and made him station chief in Bonn, effective in February. It would be Bearden’s final assignment at the CIA.
Next, the investigators went to see Colin Thompson, who had retired from the CIA in 1988. He also was expecting them. “I knew there was an investigation going on, and I knew I was one of the suspects,” he said. “I had been in the counterintelligence group since 1978. I had handled Boris Yuzhin”—the KGB man code-named TWINE who had been betrayed by Ames, convicted of espionage in Moscow, and, in 1987, sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor.
“The gist of the questions was: If you were a spy, how would you work it?” Thompson recalled. “They were interested in how I handled Yuzhin, how requirements were passed on, did I carry documents out of the building.” Bearden and Thompson remained on the list of suspects after the interviews, despite the fact that the investigators had learned nothing new of consequence from them.
On November 12, 1991, they got around to interviewing Rick Ames at CIA headquarters. “He was calm, cool, and collected,” said Holt. “We broached the subject with him just like we did with everybody else, and we told him that we were working to determine the reason for the compromises that began occurring in 1985, and we would like the benefit of his thoughts on that.”
The interviewers asked Ames to explain where he had been assigned, how he had handled his assignments at the Agency, the extent of his access to the blown operations, the names of the people he had worked with, and whether he had any theories on what had gone wrong.
“It was somewhat generic,” said Holt. In a half hour, the interview was complete.
“I thought it was routine,” Ames said. During the interview, Ames twice volunteered that he had received a letter admonishing him for leaving his safe open back in July 1985, the only written reprimand of his entire career at the CIA. He told the investigators that the safe had contained case histories of some of the Soviet agents who had been betrayed, along with combinations to other safes that held more secrets about the dead and disappeared spies.
Ames left the interview relieved. “I didn’t see it as a probe aimed at me specifically,” he said.
In fact, he had aroused the investigators’ curiosity. Shortly after the interview, they ordered a full computer scan of records in the Directorate of Operations regarding Ames; he was the only employee singled out for such scrutiny. The printouts provided a new and provocative piece of the puzzle.
It was a copy of a cable the FBI’s Washington field office had sent to the CIA back in July 1986—a second request for reports from Ames on his meetings with the diplomat Sergei Chuvakhin. These were the contacts that Ames had never reported but that had been witnessed by the FBI counterintelligence officers who were keeping watch on the Soviet Embassy. The records showed that the CIA had promised the Bureau that it would respond to the requests but never had.
Bear Bryant grew impatient. He had a crime, but no suspect and no evidence. So he organized another investigative squad at the field office that would report to him. The man he tapped to run it was Tim Caruso, the ANLACE veteran with thinning hair and a droll sense of humor, the Bureau’s chief of Soviet counterintelligence analysis.
On a cold, threatening day in November, Caruso was ushered into the carpeted inner sanctum of Division Five, the main intelligence arm of the FBI, on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “There were a lot of blue suits around,” Caruso said. Bryant was there, as was Pat Watson, the deputy assistant director of operations in the intelligence division. Watson served as an FBI goodwill ambassador to the CIA, trying to salve bruised egos and ease tensions when there was a row.
“We’re back to the penetration issue, Tim,” Caruso was told as he settled in a chair. The discussion was matter-of-fact, like doctors discussing a cancer patient whose disease had been in remission but now had returned in a highly virulent form. Bryant and Watson told Caruso of the interrogations that were under way and ordered him to put together a group of agents to investigate what came in from the ongoing analysis and match it with old counterintelligence leads that had never been resolved. Caruso thought back to the fruitless work of the ANLACE team, the long months inside the tiny vault. He was returning to the bureau of missing persons, the rag-and-bone shop of the cold war. He moved from his headquarters office to Bryant’s shop at Buzzard Point to run the new squad. They began poring over a long list of blown cases, recruitments gone bad, ambiguous anomalies.
They tried looking at the cases from new angles. For months, they stepped through the looking glass of intelligence to try to identify the mole’s Russian controller. If there were a mole, he would have to have had a handler—almost certainly a KGB officer assigned to Washington in the mid-1980s. The information the mole handed over would have been sent straight to Moscow by diplomatic pouch. But if the Russians had stuck by their standard tradecraft, they would have set up a system for secret communications, probably by way of prearranged dead drops and signal sites. And someone would have to have served as the man who placed the signals and picked up the stolen information.
“We identified about thirty or so intelligence personnel in the Russian colony of Washington, D.C., that we believed would be involved in the running of an American agent in Washington,” Caruso said. And then they set about tracing the surveillance records they had compiled on those officers, which often included minutely detailed accounts of their comings and goings in Washington. The average tour for a KGB officer in Washington was four or five years. The squad had to examine every day in the lives of the thirty KGB men—a total of 150 years. The task sent agents rummaging through the files for daily reports on long-forgotten surveillances, searching for something slightly askew, maybe even something missing that should have been there—a gap of fifteen minutes when a KGB officer might have slipped his tail to empty a drop site. The inquiry was a long shot. But if they found that a KGB officer had dropped from view at the same time as a suspect from the BIGOT list had gone on vacation or taken a leave of absence, that could lead them straight to the mole. “You look at those times that we found were unaccounted for,” said Caruso, “and then start to narrow things down.”
By the time they were done, Caruso’s investigators had prepared minutely detailed chronologies on both the Soviets and some of their CIA suspects, keeping logs of their daily activities by drawing time lines on long rolls of butcher paper, somberly unfurling them at briefings like religious scrolls. They hoped the lines would converge at some point and reveal the mole meeting his handler. The butcher-paper charts grew longer and longer, stretching from wall to wall in the office at Buzzard Point. But they never reached a conclusion.
In December 1991, Caruso’s team sought to push its investigation overseas. It wanted access to the files of the Stasi, the newly dismantled East German intelligence service, once probably the most lethally efficient spying operation outside of Moscow. With the crumbling of communism, the files were available to the CIA. Could the Stasi have run a U.S. intelligence officer as a mole on behalf of their Soviet patrons? If not, had the Russians been giving the East Germans a look at any of the mole’s information? After all, two of the blown Soviet agents had spied for the United States from Germany. Perhaps the files would yield a clue.
But the CIA’s station chief in Bonn blocked the FBI’s access to the Stasi files and the Agency’s translations of them. He bluntly told the Bureau that they could not fish in his waters.
Bryant was furious. This was a criminal case. His agents needed information. This station chief was stonewalling him. Bryant screamed his rage into his secure telephone, his profanity booming down the halls of the field office. He accused FBI headquarters of gutlessly refusing to stand up for the investigation. He threatened to indict the station chief for obstruction of justice and warned that he had already gone to federal prosecutors about the case.
In the end, Pat Watson paid a courtesy call on the Agency. Two months later, Milt Bearden became the new station chief in Bonn. He smoothed the waters, the FBI got access to the files, and the idea of prosecution was quietly shelved. But the bad blood remained.
At Christmastime, Rick Ames and his family made their pilgrimage to Bogotá. Ames parked his wife and son at the house of Rosario’s relatives and set off for his annual face-to-face meeting at the Russian Embassy.
Ames had both good and bad news for the Russians. They worked out their plans for the coming year, and Ames shared his progress reports on the KGB Working Group. He also provided details on double-agent operations that he had gleaned from his work at the Counterintelligence Center. But, unhappily, he reported that he was being transferred out of the Soviet division yet again.
Ames was being assigned to the Agency’s Counternarcotics Center. It was a kind of Siberia, one of the least desirable posts at the CIA. The idea of centers—Counterintelligence, Counternarcotics, Counterterrorism—had come into vogue under William Webster’s tenure. They had been intended to be think tanks where people could share ideas within the intelligence community. But they had never worked that way, especially not the Counternarcotics Center, which had been set up largely as a way to get money from Congress for the never-ending war on drugs.
The CIA and the nation’s principal counternarcotics agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, were mortal enemies. “The DEA hated and feared us, and we had contempt for DEA,” Ames said. The relationship had been poisoned by cases such as the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Enrique Camarena, a DEA official in Mexico who had disappeared in 1985. The DEA had linked a high-ranking Mexican law enforcement official—a long-standing CIA agent—to the killing. Then, in 1990, the CIA, which was supposed to be coordinating its work on a drug-smuggling operation—one involving a Venezuelan general—with the DEA, had managed to ship a ton of nearly pure cocaine to the United States. The drugs had wound up on the streets of south Florida. “A most regrettable incident,” the CIA said when reporters found out about it.
The relationship between the CIA and U.S. law enforcement agencies was a perfect mismatch. As Gates delicately stated the problem during his confirmation hearings, “there has been friction over time between the CIA and law enforcement agencies in terms of the intelligence that the CIA collected. The law enforcement agencies want to use that information in court. They want to use it to prosecute people. And there is a concern in CIA, naturally, for the protection of sources and methods, and to be able to prosecute, that would require revealing the sources and methods.”
So the CIA’s role in the war on drugs was, to put it politely, circumscribed. And the Counternarcotics Center, appropriately located in the Agency’s basement, was a demoralized and demoralizing place to be.
But to Rick Ames’s complete surprise, he liked the job. To his colleagues’ surprise, he was fairly good at it. He even came up with a splendid idea: the Black Sea Initiative.
The idea was to work with the intelligence services of Russia, Turkey, and the Eastern European nations to focus on heroin flowing west from Afghanistan through the former Soviet republics. The CIA had run guns into Afghanistan for a decade to help the Afghan rebels fend off the Soviet invaders during the 1980s but had no idea about the flow of heroin base—hundreds of tons a year—that was coming out of Afghanistan now that the invaders had been vanquished.
What Ames loved most about the project was the prospect of liaison—going abroad on a regular basis to meet with foreign intelligence officers. “I had never been in liaison before,” he said. “I had never sat down as a CIA officer talking to any other service, never in my career. And all of a sudden, I’d be sitting down, wheeling and dealing with the Russians, the Bulgarians, the Turks, and putting them all together and having a grand time. It was really exhilarating.” Upon his return to headquarters, Ames spent January and February 1992 laying the groundwork for the first of his liaison trips.
He’d be going to Moscow soon.