by Bryan Denson
Jim and Polyakov spent the next couple of days in Delhi getting to know each other. The two men were close in age, but Polyakov had risen much further in his spy agency than had Jim. Polyakov was born into what passed as privilege in the old Soviet Union. His father had been a member of the Communist Party Central Committee. Polyakov was chief of the SVR’s South Asia Division, a high-level position equivalent to that of a senior intelligence officer in the CIA.
Moscow had called in a serious player to handle Jim.
Russian spies took a long-term approach to running agents, and the U.S. could have learned a few things. When the CIA recruited foreign assets to spy for the United States, it almost always assigned their care and handling to a case officer in an overseas station. This meant that if the CIA handler was reassigned to a different city—as often they were—the foreign asset got a different handler. This required the new case officer to waste time boning up on the asset and forging a brand-new spy-and-handler relationship. The Russians labored to keep things simple. Typically one spy was assigned to one handler, forever. Polyakov would handle Jim as long as he was helpful to the SVR.
For the next couple of days, Polyakov and his fellow officers coached Jim on how to beat the inevitable polygraphs back at Langley. Jim and his SVR handler both knew the CIA would eventually run him through one of its routine lie-detector tests and ask him variations of the question most likely to trip him up: Have you had unauthorized contact with foreigners? Jim would have to learn how to lie without tripping the box. Polyakov’s people prepared him to defeat the test without drugs.
For as long as police, government agencies, and private employers have used polygraphs, people have found ways to muddle the results. They have swallowed sedatives, counted backward in their heads, applied antiperspirant to their fingertips, and—to increase blood pressure readings early in the test—taken such measures as holding their breath, tightening their sphincters, or imagining wild sex. The polygraph test is, by most accounts, an interrogation tool backed by a modicum of science; the better the polygraph operator, the better the chance of getting to the truth.
The Russians hooked Jim up to the box and got him comfortable for practice runs. They threw him a curve by putting him through their own single-issue test to ask whether he had reported any of his illegal contacts with the Russians to anyone. Jim must have passed easily, because the Russians kept him on the payroll.
Before departing Delhi, Polyakov told Jim to buy a Toshiba Satellite T1960CT, a state-of-the-art laptop that ran Windows 3.1. The Russians were thinking ahead as they collected data from their agent. They hoped later to get Jim to download files to diskettes, which they would teach him to encrypt, minimizing his chances of getting caught with a satchel of top-secret documents.
With his kids spending Christmas with Laurie and his family, Jim passed through Kuala Lumpur, where he wired $9,000 to his credit union checking account and a $6,000 cash payment toward his American Express card. He flew home, stopping in Oregon to ring in the New Year with his parents. On Saturday, December 31, 1994, Jim walked into his credit union in Eugene, where he pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills. He put down $3,000 to pay off the loan on Laurie’s Volkswagen and applied $10,019.35 toward his Visa card.
Camp Peary, Virginia, early 1995
By January, Jim’s second group of students had completed their first full week of instruction. He wrote in his personal journal that he was impressed with his class, and pleased with the quality and nature of his life. “I have those who love me, plenty of things to keep me occupied, and am living a great adventure,” he wrote. “I want this to continue to the end, getting better and better. I really should write an adventure book, or at least try to.”
Jim surfed the CIA’s computer system from his office at The Farm. His top-secret security clearance gave him access to cables pouring in from around the world, many of which were potentially valuable to the Russians. He printed out files and took them home, where he typed up summaries of the juicier tidbits and copied them to diskettes.
With summer approaching, Jim cabled his superiors at Langley with plans to take his annual vacation leave. After school ended he would pack the kids off for Oregon, where they would stay with Nick and Betty until Laurie completed a six-week field study program in the scrublands of eastern Oregon. Jim would then fly to Singapore, bound for Jakarta, Indonesia, and Kuala Lumpur, with a side trip to Hong Kong. In July, he mailed the Russians a postcard to the Zimbabwe accommodation site with a phony return address from their old friend Nevil R. Strachey, a signal their next meeting was on.
He met Polyakov in a park that July in Jakarta, where they exchanged pleasantries and another shopping bag of files that included reports about the exhaustive debriefings of Aldrich Ames. They met again later that day in a Russian housing complex, where Polyakov handed Jim a package that held another $50,000 in cash. It was there in Indonesia’s capital city that Polyakov began to give Jim tasks. He wanted to know how the Clinton administration would react if Boris Yeltsin ramped up military operations against the Chechen guerrillas who had broken from the Russian Federation and were clashing on the border with Russia’s troops. Polyakov also wanted Jim to learn more about the Ames debriefings; the SVR was desperate to know how much information the imprisoned former CIA man had coughed up about their dealings.
When spies like Ames were caught, the FBI and CIA were left to determine the extent of the damage they caused. They often debriefed the turncoats for many days, wringing every detail out of them, in what are called damage assessments. Ames’ plea agreement required that he share every move he made, every secret he sold, during his decade of espionage on behalf of Moscow. For months, he had recalled the fine points of his staggering perfidy.
Ames had begun moonlighting as an agent of the KGB in 1985, serving nine years as its mole inside the CIA. He betrayed the names of dozens of operatives on the payrolls of Western spy agencies. The KGB reportedly killed at least ten of those assets, one of whom was a two-star general in Soviet military intelligence who had sold Moscow’s secrets to the FBI for nearly twenty years. Congress would later rip the CIA for failing to determine early in its mole hunt that Ames was living awfully high on the hog for an agency man. He had never earned more than $69,843 a year, yet he had paid cash for for a $540,000 house. One of the Jaguars he drove during his work for Moscow was valued at $49,000. Ames’ wife, Rosario, had expensive tastes.
The U.S. government had collected a massive pile of evidence against Ames to make sure he pleaded guilty. The specter of such a spy testifying at trial was nightmarish. Not only was the CIA red-faced that it took years to roll up one of its own, but the idea of watching such a diabolical turncoat take the witness stand gave them shivers. Ames literally knew too much. From the stand, he could have betrayed closely held secrets about ongoing spy operations, putting even more lives at risk.
To thwart such a move, prosecutors seized on Ames’ key vulnerability—his concern for his wife, Rosario—and cut a deal that would ensure keeping sensitive information out of the news. Ames, acting out of love and sorrow, accepted a life prison term in exchange for a lenient sentence for Rosario. He would later come to believe he’d been snookered by the government.
“I think I made it clear at . . . my plea and sentencing hearing that my wife’s involvement was limited to a year and a half of guilty knowledge at the source of my money,” Ames wrote in his letter from Allenwood. “I was led to believe by her attorney and my own that she could receive a life sentence if found guilty at trial. It was therefore a no-brainer for me to forsake my defenses and my bargaining leverage. I have since learned, of course, that the threat of a life or 40-year sentence was an empty one.”
While in Jakarta that July, Polyakov told Jim that it was too risky for him to keep copying and carrying paper documents into their meetings. Jim spent his final day there learning how to code his work with the Soviets’ encryption progr
am. Then he flew out of the Indonesian city, over the Java Sea, to Kuala Lumpur, and formally broke things off with Lily. He headed back to Camp Peary, where he penned a new entry in his journal: “I live my life in the rapids-head, afloat and sometimes in seeming control, but always in danger of drowning whether I recognize it or not.”
It was about that time in 1995 that a squad of FBI counterintelligence agents based out of the Washington Metropolitan Field Office ramped up its investigation of several CIA officers suspected of leaking secrets to Russia. A supervisory agent named Tony Buckmeier, who worked at headquarters, drove over to the CIA’s Directorate of Operations to get a list of CIA officers who might fit the bill supplied by the Russian source.The FBI team winnowed the list of suspects to about seven CIA officers, and Jim was at the top of their list. They wanted to put him under the full weight of the bureau’s eavesdropping capabilities, a brand of surveillance bordering on the proctologic. But when Buckmeier took their evidence to Justice Department lawyers for review, they told him he didn’t have enough evidence. Miffed but undeterred, Buckmeier carried his papers to Marion “Spike” Bowman, a senior FBI lawyer.
Bowman was an expert in the legal complexities of spy cases. He had served six years in Navy counterintelligence, then twenty-one as a JAG officer, before being recruited to work in the FBI’s National Security Law Branch. His job was to keep the bureau’s spy catchers on solid legal footing and, as he often put it, out of jail. Bowman and Larry Parkinson, the FBI’s deputy general counsel, dug through the mound of papers outlining evidence against Jim and other CIA officers who might be spying for the Russians. Bowman and Parkinson spent days poring over the multitude of facts gathered by the investigative team, tapping evidence into a spreadsheet. They built a matrix around information provided by several sources—including the CIA’s key Russian tipster—and matched it against the data on the group of CIA officers. The evidence wasn’t conclusive, Bowman said many years later. But it pointed to Jim.
Their first option was to take the evidence to lawyers in the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation. But that exposed them to questions about the Russian. The first thing Justice’s lawyers would ask is how much money the CIA was paying him. Too little, and they would question the authenticity of his information; too much, and it sounded like bribery.
A better option, Bowman and Parkinson agreed, was to keep the inquiry under tight wraps and out of the hands of criminal investigators until necessary. They drafted an application to eavesdrop on Jim under the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The law permitted government agents to set up wiretaps and other forms of surveillance against suspected spies or terrorists working for foreign powers on U.S. soil. The FBI lawyers got their application signed by Louis J. Freeh, the bureau’s director, and then, joined by Buckmeier, crossed Pennsylvania Avenue with a thick paper file stamped “Top Secret” to confer with the Department of Justice’s national security team. Janet Reno or one of her top subordinates certified the application and allowed the FBI men to carry it upstairs to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The panel operated in the penthouse of the Justice Department, the most secretive court in the land. It was no conventional courtroom, but more of a windowless office behind a cipher-locked door, its walls impervious to electronic bugging. A lone judge, one of seven working on a regular rotation, sat behind a big desk poring over FISA applications. The judges had no room for a gallery, no need for a gavel. Their job was to look over applications by the FBI, CIA, or National Security Agency to physically or electronically eavesdrop on espionage or terrorism suspects. The panel’s judges would review 697 government applications to snoop on targets that year, approving every one of them. At least two of the classified orders targeted Jim.
The FBI also sent national security letters to banks and credit institutions where Jim kept his money. A 1981 law allowed the FBI to collect Jim’s financial records, and it forbade bankers from disclosing to Jim that they had handed them over. Agents pored through every penny that moved through Jim’s credit cards, checking accounts, and savings. They matched his deposits against his overseas travels, and they found a pattern. Jim had deposited cash into all manner of bank accounts, including savings for his three children, immediately after his foreign travels. The amounts of those deposits were highly suspicious for a CIA man earning less than $80,000 a year.
On October 16, 1995, a CIA polygraph operator hooked Jim to the box, part of what he thought was a routine security update. Jim’s answers, examined by computer, showed he was deceptive on two questions: Are you hiding involvement with a foreign intelligence service? Have you had unauthorized contact with a foreign intelligence service? Four days later, they put Jim through another polygraph. This time, his answer to one question—Are you concealing contact with any foreign nationals?—proved inconclusive.
When Jim came back for a third polygraph on December 4, 1995, the polygraph operator noticed that he took deep breaths and held them during the control questions—a clear attempt to elevate his heart rate and throw off the machine. The operator told him to knock it off. A computer analysis of Jim’s lie-detector test showed there was an 88 percent chance he answered deceptively when asked two questions: Since 1990, have you had contact with a foreign intelligence service that you are trying to hide from the CIA? Are you trying to hide any contact with a foreign intelligence service since 1990?
Jim did not hear from Langley about the results of his latest bout with the box. No news was typically good news where CIA polygraphs were concerned.
Two weeks later, Jim boarded a plane for Zurich, Switzerland.
He rendezvoused with Polyakov in the lobby of the luxurious hotel Novotel, where he handed over diskettes he had encrypted himself. The storage devices, primitive by today’s standards, were choked with the names of more CIA trainees and additional details about the government’s debriefings of Ames. A grateful Polyakov handed him $125,000—Jim’s standard $50,000 payment, plus the $75,000 Moscow had been holding for him. That evening, after Polyakov had digested the new information, he joined Jim for a dinner of sashimi and yakitori at a Japanese restaurant. The Russian told him that some of the information about Ames was new, which suggested to Jim that the SVR might have another mole inside the CIA.
While in Zurich, Jim paid a visit to Bank Leu, an institution built more than forty years before Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Switzerland. Swiss banks are spectacularly secretive, and a who’s who of notorious crooks have used them to hide money. Bank Leu’s good name had weathered some unfortunate publicity in the 1980s, having stored tens of millions of U.S. dollars acquired by the likes of Ivan Boesky, the arbitrageur who famously told business school graduates, “I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
Jim met with Roland Keller, a Bank Leu manager who handled private accounts. Keller was happy to deposit Jim’s $61,000 in U.S. cash in an account bearing the name “Harold Nicholson.” Jim jotted down his Swiss bank number on the back of Keller’s business card and slipped it into his wallet, a tiny mistake that would come back to haunt him.
Back at Camp Peary, Jim continued blowing cash on the kids, who found life with their single dad a parade of adventures. They had toured Colonial Williamsburg and spent days at Busch Gardens Theme Park and Water Country USA. They ate out whenever they pleased. Their house had the latest big-screen TVs. Sometime in 1995, Jim bought Nathan a state-of-the-art Sega Saturn video console, allowing his boy to lose himself in the hit game Virtua Fighter 2. When the game system crashed, Jim sent it out for repairs and hightailed it to the store to buy a new one so Nathan wouldn’t miss a beat.
With Christmas approaching, Russia’s money in his pockets, his kids safely parked in Oregon with Laurie, and his relationship with Lily safely in the rearview mirror, Jim jetted off to Bangkok to visit his old love Kanokwan Lehliem. Jim had feelings for the quiet Thai for a deca
de, and while it’s unknown how closely they kept in contact, their romance clearly was rekindling.
When Jim returned to the U.S., he made eleven bank transactions that put $26,900 into his accounts and mutual funds. The SVR had now paid him a quarter-million dollars, with promises of much more.
Langley, Virginia, early 1996
On March 17, an SVR officer reached out to the FBI for information that might help Moscow’s efforts to combat terrorists in Chechnya. The SVR officer told the FBI that the request was part of a global accumulation of information on Chechen terrorists by Russia’s foreign spy service. It wasn’t an unusual request. The southwestern corner of Russia was embroiled in a bloody civil war that had been a long time coming, and Washington and Moscow had mutual interests in holding Chechnya’s Islamic terrorists at bay.
Chechens had been itching to get out from under Moscow’s thumb since the early 1920s, when they were dragged into the Soviet Union by the Red Army. As the U.S.S.R. disintegrated, they declared their patch of the Northern Caucasus, between the Caspian and Black Seas, a sovereign nation. But Mother Russia, whose oil and gas pipelines passed through Chechnya, wasn’t having any of it.
In December 1994, Russian president Boris Yeltsin had sent troops into Chechnya to disarm the resistance in places like Grozny, which Chechens had declared their capital. The Russian military swept in with tanks and warplanes and artillery. But they were met with waves of protesters and heavily armed guerrilla forces in a city already teeming with crime bosses, gun-toting thugs, and a smattering of Muslim terrorists. Tens of thousands of people died in the fighting. The Russians left Grozny looking like a sepia photo of Oradour-sur-Glane at the end of World War II, a wasteland of rubble and twisted columns of metal.
On the afternoon of April 21, 1996, Yeltsin and President Clinton met in the Kremlin, where Yeltsin told reporters, “There are no military operations now under way” in Chechnya. But late that very evening, the key leader in Chechnya’s war against Russia, General Dzhokhar Dudayev, was talking on a satellite phone in the western village of Gekhi-Chu when a Russian rocket hurtled earthward and killed him. Many observers believe Western intelligence—most likely the NSA—honed in on the phone to help knock off the Chechen leader, stabilize the region, and push Yeltsin to reelection over Communist Party challenger Gennadi A. Zyuganov. While the U.S. role may never be completely known, Yeltsin retained the presidency and prevented a communist resurgence, a major victory for the West.