In the hunt for spies, things are not always what they appear to
by Edward T. Pound, Brian Duffy
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Some time during the day on May 12, 1993, FBI agents assigned to the bureau's Washington Metropolitan Field Office formally opened an investigation of CIA officer Aldrich Ames. The investigation was code-named "Nightmover," and it was to be run by special agents assigned to one of the two counterintelligence squads in the field office at Buzzard's Point on the torpid Anacostia River. With their colleagues on the 10-person squad, Special Agents Mike Mitchell, Doug Gregory and Leslie Wiser Jr. would do the scut work of Nightmover, posing as home repairmen and trash collectors as they closed in on Ames and his wife, Maria. But the agents would be closely supervised by the man who ran Buzzard's Point, Special Agent-in-Charge Robert Bryant. "Bear" Bryant had spent most of his career in counterintelligence work chasing spies, and he understood the importance of the Nightmover case. He and his agents could be forgiven, though, if they were nervous about how it would turn out.
There were reasons to worry. The CIA was notoriously reluctant to look for trouble in its elite clandestine service, the FBI and the CIA had a habit of tripping over one another when they did go mole hunting and the Soviets were energetic practitioners of the arcane art of recruiting spies and then covering their tracks. Last week, FBI agents charged that the Russians paid Ames more than $2.7 million and perhaps even more. Investigators conducting a wide ranging damage assessment review of the Ames affair are now trying to determine whether the Soviets had a second mole in the CIA.
The hunt for Ames was intense. The CIA had had an unusually high number of intelligence failures in the Soviet Union, and investigators began looking for a mole. Ames was on a list of some 200 suspects from the start, sources say. But although he had bought a $540,000 house for cash, a $40,000 Jaguar and other luxuries, officials say Ames did not emerge as a leading suspect in the investigation until late 1992. But as suspicions swirled around him, Ames was transferred to a less sensitive post in the CIA's Counternarcotics Center. "He was more equal than most under suspicion back in 1991," another intelligence source confirms. "He was getting close to the focal point."
The FBI and CIA began working more closely to pare the suspect list from 200 to 40, then to 20. Then, in 1992, the mole hunters got a lucky break. Although he didn't know the name of the CIA mole, a defector from Moscow helped lead the counterintelligence officers even closer to Ames.
But months passed before Bear Bryant's FBI agents began investigating Ames. Delays can mean blown cases, a fact the FBI's spy chasers knew from past experience. In 1985, CIA officials had delayed for months before informing the FBI of a suspected spy in the agency's ranks named Edward Lee Howard. Howard had slipped away from an FBI surveillance team and turned up in Moscow. After the Howard fiasco, the FBI and CIA signed a classified "memorandum of understanding." According to knowledgeable officials, it requires the CIA to notify the FBI of espionage problems in a timely fashion.
This was not the first time the FBI and CIA had a problem coordinating. Despite the memorandum of understanding signed after the Howard case, the CIA had delayed informing the FBI of suspected espionage problems on several occasions since that time, senior government officials say. A few espionage cases were not prosecuted, these officials say, because of problems between the agencies. "Individuals were already interrogated [by the CIA], or they were terminated" before the FBI was notified, one official says, and the CIA asked for FBI assistance in several cases only after they had been bungled. The intelligence committees on Capitol Hill are aware of the problem, a congressional source says. A CIA spokesman says the agency has excellent relations with the FBI.
The poison dwarf. The FBI and CIA also had an enormous falling out over a major counterintelligence investigation in Germany that began in the early 1990s. Neither FBI counterintelligence officials nor the CIA would comment on the matter, but sources say the case was being investigated by agents from the FBI's Buzzard's Point field office. Those agents were stymied by the CIA station chief in Bonn, sources say. The sources told U.S. News that the station chief, whom his British colleagues dubbed "the poison dwarf," denied FBI agents access to documents and witnesses. Robert Bryant, in charge of the investigation and now in charge of FBI counterintelligence matters, asked his superiors to authorize an obstruction-of-justice investigation of the CIA station chief, who has since been transferred. His request was denied.
With Ames and his wife in jail and a federal judge having denied them bail, the CIA's "damage assessment review" is in full swing. CIA officials believe as many as 10 agents may have died because of Ames, but they have evidence about only a few. The review could cover Ames's activities as far back as 1981. "You basically have to look every place he was, every cable, every document that came through that station or office," a government investigator says. "It's an unbelievable task."
The damage assessment began months before Ames was arrested, government sources say, but some of the endless questions intelligence officers face may never be answered. One, for example, involves a CIA agent code-named "GTMotorboat." He was identified by FBI Special Agent Wiser in a court hearing for Ames and his wife last week. Wiser said Ames had met GTMotorboat, identified by some intelligence officials as a senior Hungarian intelligence official. The agent gave Ames several top-secret documents, Wiser said; Ames later identified the agent to his controllers in Moscow and GTMotorboat disappeared. "The CIA has made many attempts to locate him," Wiser said, "without success." If true, Ames may have caused not only GTMotorboat's death but the liquidation of an entire CIA spy network in Hungary: A number of agents secretly working for the United States were executed in Hungary in 1988.
Two moles? An even more critical question is whether a second mole assisted Ames. Working in the CIA's Counter-narcotics Center, Ames should not have had access to highly classified reports on Russian intelligence. Yet when FBI officers raided his office at CIA headquarters, they found 154 such documents classified secret and top secret; agents discovered 100 more classified cables stored in Ames's home computer -- including a top secret report on the CIA's controversial counterintelligence czar, the late James Jesus Angleton. The question: Did Ames steal them, or did another CIA employee give them to him?
Yet another question involves a KGB defector named Vitaly Yurchenko. In June 1985, Yurchenko sauntered into the U.S. Embassy in Rome claiming to be a burned-out spy with a bad marriage, an indifferent girlfriend and a desire to betray the Soviet Union. Yurchenko lasted three months before he slipped away from his CIA handlers in a restaurant, returned to Moscow and dealt the agency one more black eye.
During his brief stay in the United States, several CIA officers -- including the alleged KGB mole Aldrich Ames -- conducted videotaped debriefings of Yurchenko. Yurchenko divulged the identities of two spies, Edward Lee Howard, the CIA officer who later eluded FBI agents and defected to Moscow, and Ronald Pelton, a paunchy, fair-haired employee of the National Security Agency, America's worldwide eavesdropping bureaucracy. Howard and Pelton seemed like big catches at the time. In a meeting on the Howard case between then CIA Director William Casey and President Ronald Reagan, according to a senior intelligence official who was present, Casey said the treason had stopped with Howard: There had been no deeper Soviet penetration of the CIA.
