Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  While three of the top polygraph examiners in the country work at the CIA, most of the others at the agency are considered within the profession to be lacking in expertise. With characteristic arrogance, the CIA insists on training its own operators instead of sending them to a Defense Department school used by the FBI, NSA, and other federal agencies. The Chicago school where CIA examiners are sent teaches that their perception of a subject’s body language and demeanor should override what the polygraphs tell them. Thus if subjects such as Ames or Koecher are skilled at inventing stories, CIA examiners are taught to accept them. Since spies are whizzes at making up stories, and since they receive further training from the KGB, it is no wonder the CIA’s polygraph operators are no match for them.

  Thus the CIA’s polygraph program is a joke, one that searches for ways to ignore signs of deception. Low-level employees who may have engaged in minor transgressions but have no standing within the agency are flunked. Higher-level employees who are spies are given the benefit of the doubt. By contrast, the FBI’s policy is to report deceptive results without any filtering by polygraph examiners. It is then up to investigators to determine the facts about their activities. In Ames’s case, no investigators were alerted to the fact that he had failed the tests.

  How the CIA could disregard its own tests becomes easier to understand when the CIA’s attitude about security and its other failures in the Ames case are examined. How could the agency allow such a heavy drinker as Ames to continue in his sensitive job? The fact is that only the most public and embarrassing drunkenness results in the withdrawal of a CIA officer. In one European country, a CIA officer routinely hit a bar at 10:30 A.M. It was not until he urinated in his pants in the embassy that the CIA, after much soulsearching, reluctantly transferred him to headquarters. How could the agency have allowed Ames to have access to almost everything? The fact is that the agency’s vaunted “compartmentation” is a joke. Supervisors boast of major successes at meetings, and officers exchange information over lunch or—in Ames’s case—during smoking breaks outside the CIA’s building.

  Besides having easy access to almost any information he wanted because of his counterintelligence functions, Ames sat on two promotion boards that allowed him to learn the identities and recruitment successes of hundreds of other CIA officers throughout the world. How could the agency have ignored Ames’s unexplained wealth? The fact is that even when Ames engaged in gross security violations, no disciplinary action was ever meted out. Indeed, after being caught in the CIA safe house in New York with Maria, Ames was promoted.

  How could an examiner have blithely dismissed Ames’s demonstrated deception as being related to the Jaguar-owner’s purported worries about money? Not wanting to share their power with polygraphers, and fearful of a tool they do not fully understand, the princes of the CIA pressure examiners to pass subjects who have failed. How could an officer with Ames’s demonstrated lack of ability even be allowed to work at the CIA, much less in a sensitive position? Coworkers thought Ames was not very bright. Underscoring that judgment, Ames kept notes to his Russian handlers and records of the payments he received from them in his personal computer at home. Ames was either illiterate or made a lot of typos. In one note to his Russian handlers, replicated from a typewriter ribbon, Ames said: “Besides getting cash in Carascus [sic] (I have mentuoned [sic] how little I like this method, though it is acceptable), I still hope that you will have decided on some safer, paper transfer of some sort of a large amount [of money].”

  Part of the answer to how the CIA could employ someone of his caliber in a key position is that the CIA has always used counterintelligence as a dumping ground for the least competent officers. Traditionally, the way to advance has been to obtain positive intelligence that will impress the president with the CIA’s capabilities. Forgotten in that shortsighted approach is the fact that without good counterintelligence and security, the best sources in the world will be executed before they have had a chance to tell the CIA anything.

  Once officers become part of the exclusive club that constitutes the Directorate of Operations, they are immune from accountability to the outside world. The secrecy, the exclusivity, and the power that go with having inside information all conspire to create an unreal atmosphere that leads to unfathomable disasters such as the Ames case. Like any fashionable club, the clandestine service excludes outsiders such as women, who are looked down upon and given little chance to rise.

  The CIA not only protects its own, it punishes those who blow the whistle and object to lax discipline. Such people are considered troublemakers who do not understand the system. Proposals to tighten security are met with exaggeration—that they would turn the CIA into Alcatraz.

  After the Ames case broke, the CIA’s inspector general began investigating what went wrong. It was typical of the inspector general’s office that initially Burton L. Gerber was to be in overall charge of the investigation. Gerber was one of those CIA officials who had promoted Ames. While Gerber was later taken off the case, many of the investigators had previously worked in the Directorate of Operations and would be returning to it once their assignment to the inspector general was over. Having the CIA investigate itself was a waste of time and money.

  Instead of improving security, the CIA’s response over the years to embarrassing spy cases has been to try to cover them up by opposing prosecutions that would make its mistakes public. Thus the CIA’s blasé attitude about security is a form of self-protection, a way of insulating CIA officers from accountability. The attitude is fueled by directors of Central Intelligence who consider the subject of security to be both dreary and beneath them.

  Instead of signaling that business as usual would not do, Woolsey defended the agency publicly, minimized the damage, and misled the intelligence committees about Ames’s polygraph results, saying he passed with flying colors. Only after the author’s op-ed piece criticizing Woolsey for not taking the polygraph test appeared in the March 8, 1994 New York Times did Woolsey issue the word that he would take the test. He did not say when.

  The CIA was founded to prevent another surprise attack such as occurred at Pearl Harbor. Over the years, the CIA has served that purpose well, predicting most of the changes and threats it should have predicted. But the damage from the Ames case to the CIA’s credibility and to its reputation for protecting its sources and methods was devastating.

  “There has been massive incompetence at the CIA,” an official working on the Ames case said.

  If the Ames case demonstrated that the CIA’s security system is a failure, it also illustrated how easy it was for the CIA to mislead the press. Besides frequent references to Ames’s passing his polygraph tests instead of failing them, the media ran stories suggesting that the Ames case meant that Yurchenko was not a real defector after all; that it was Ames’s wife, rather than Ames, who had recruited him to spy for the Russians; and that it was brilliant CIA analysis and access to German Stasi files, rather than an FBI defector’s information, that had led to Ames’s arrest; that Ames’s spying was the fault of the FBI, rather than the CIA; and that the FBI was leaking unfavorable stories about the CIA.

  In fact, electronic interception of Ames’s conversations showed that forty-one-year-old Maria Ames did not know about her husband’s spy activities until 1991. Rather than show Yurchenko to be a plant, the Ames case meant that still-unresolved leads Yurchenko provided about moles in the CIA should be pursued even more vigorously, which the FBI began doing. The CIA’s negligence in ignoring all the warning signs that Ames was spying was akin to a bank’s leaving its front door and vault door open overnight. While it would be nice if the police had spotted the open door, the primary fault lay with the institution that left the doors open. Finally, while FBI agents were livid about the way the CIA had allowed both the CIA’s and FBI’s operations to be compromised, many FBI officials went out of their way to downplay the CIA’s blunders. Because they still had to work with the agency, they did not want to exac
erbate frictions between the agencies.

  If nothing else, the Ames case showed that the subject of spying was not passé. Ever since the Cold War ended, the FBI and CIA had been saying that the Russians continued to spy on the U.S. No one took it seriously. Now the mailbox where Ames was said to have made chalk marks for his KGB handlers at 37th and R Streets NW in Washington was the most photographed mailbox in U.S. history. Tour buses pointed out the location to visitors from out of town. Once out of favor in Hollywood, spy movies again became highly prized.

  But the implications of the Ames case are far more serious. If the CIA is to continue to protect the U.S. from potential international threats, it must take drastic action to change the agency climate that led to the Ames case. That change has to begin at the top. By example, the director needs to show that he is ready to make a clean break with the sloppiness of the past. By initially arrogantly refusing to submit to the same security procedure as everyone else, then defending the agency’s gross negligence and incompetence, Woolsey demonstrated that he not only condoned a system that placed the country at risk, he also was not up to the task of correcting it.

  Besides getting a new director, the CIA needed to fire or remove to less-sensitive positions every supervisor who allowed Ames to continue in his job despite the obvious signs that something was wrong. To direct its Office of Security, the CIA needed to appoint a former FBI counterintelligence agent. To be sure, the FBI has made its own mistakes, including allowing Richard W. Miller, who later committed espionage, to continue as an agent. But the lapses have not stemmed from systemic problems. Over the years, the FBI has compiled an impressive record for catching spies.* Since 1975, FBI counterintelligence investigations have resulted in the prosecution of more than seventy people for espionage. All but one were convicted. The security departments of most major corporations are headed by former FBI agents, who know how to pursue investigations lawfully and are likely to have good liaison with the bureau.

  As it is, the CIA resists FBI investigations. Since 1991, the CIA has refused to cooperate with the bureau or has withheld information on at least ten occasions. Through Ames, the Russians already knew the CIA’s most valuable secrets, yet even as the FBI gathered evidence for a prosecution of Ames, the CIA continued to block the FBI from obtaining information about what Ames knew. The reason is that the CIA does not want the FBI to know of its mistakes, just as it does not really want good security.

  In many respects, the lax security is related to the CIA’s other major failing: its continuing collective enmity toward defectors such as Vitaly Yurchenko.** The agents betrayed by Ames were, in effect, defectors—in spy jargon, defectors-in-place. CIA officers have contempt for defectors, whom they regard as “pains in the ass”—unbalanced traitors to their own countries. If a man such as Ames betrays them to the other side, CIA officers do not consider the loss to be great. To them, spying is a game. So long as the princes of the CIA maintain their own lofty positions within the agency, they win.

  That judgment was borne out by the way the affair ended. Having received a scathing report from CIA inspector general Frederick P. Hitz about the Ames case, Woolsey reprimanded eleven of the twenty-three present or former CIA officers who were cited in the report for having neglected their duties by ignoring the signs that Ames was engaged in spying.

  In contrast, when FBI agents failed to watch Edward Lee Howard carefully before he escaped to the Soviet Union, they were fired. Woolsey portrayed himself as a judge who had to take into account the rights of the CIA officers involved. He said no “misconduct” was involved. What was involved was gross negligence, something for which employees of private companies are routinely fired. In this case, the national security was at stake. The inspector general found Ames had compromised some thirty-six intelligence operations. Woolsey’s inaction meant that at the CIA, “It’s business as usual,” as Senator Dennis DeConcini, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, put it.

  As might be expected, high-ranking princes of the CIA who had lobbied Woolsey on behalf of the officers applauded his decision. They had convinced Woolsey that the officers were so special that anything more than a letter in their personnel files would ruin their precious morale and was unnecessary because they were so devoted to their jobs.

  In fact, the officers in question were devoted to their own self-interest. As the inspector general concluded, CIA officers willfully ignored Ames’s spying, because they did not want to blow the whistle on one of their own. In contrast, when a female CIA station chief in Jamaica broke that code of silence by reporting a subordinate for beating his wife, the full force of the CIA’s bureaucracy came down on her. She became the target of an inspector general’s investigation, rumors were circulated about her sex life, and her career at the agency was ruined.

  Woolsey’s decision perpetuated the air of indifference that had led to the fiasco in the first place. It turned the stomachs of many CIA officers who recognized that it meant such catastrophes would happen again. To be sure, in return for leniency for his wife, Ames pleaded guilty and got life in prison without possibility of parole. But that was because his fate was in the hands of the Justice Department and FBI, not the CIA.

  To fill the vacuum caused by Woolsey’s lack of leadership, a presidential commission was formed to study ways to restructure the CIA and decide if, indeed, the agency was needed at all. Yet deciding such a question was like deciding whether a community needed a fire department. Because Woolsey had failed to seize the initiative and do his job, public support was so weakened for the agency that a commission was seen as the only way to salvage what was left of the CIA’s declining credibility.

  Ultimately, the fault lay with President Clinton, who could not manage his own White House staff, let alone the CIA. Oversight committees and commissions can go only so far in forcing change. It was up to Clinton, to whom Woolsey reported, to insist on aggressive action. What was needed was not only a series of firings but an extensive retraining program to change the culture of the agency, as well as a restructuring to bring about better coordination within the CIA.

  Until a strong and competent president overhauls the agency, America will remain at risk. Indeed, because of Ames and a few other spies such as John A. Walker, Jr., the U.S. likely would have lost a war with the Soviet Union, those familiar with the Ames case say.

  The CIA has come a long way since the days when it plotted with the Mafia to get Fidel Castro’s beard to fall off, gave LSD to unsuspecting subjects, and spied illegally on Americans. But powerful as it is, the Ames case and the way it was handled demonstrate that the CIA still has a long way to go before it becomes the effective, disciplined agency America deserves.

  The CIA’s main gate off Dolley Madison Drive is one of four entrances to the CIA compound in McLean, Virginia. (CIA photo)

  The main entrance at the front of the CIA’s old building is just to the right of the director’s suite of offices on the seventh floor. (CIA photo)

  The CIA’s old building and main entrance, in the lower right, were completed in 1961, while the new building, in the upper left, was completed in 1988. (CIA photo)

  The entrance to the CIA’s 1.1-million-square-foot new building is sheathed in glass. (CIA photo)

  The CIA’s main lobby includes a memorial to fallen CIA officers. (CIA photo)

  William J. Donovan, whose statue stands to the left as one enters the CIA’s lobby, urged creation of an agency that would centralize intelligence gathering and served as the director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. (CIA photo)

  The installation by Jim Sanborn in the courtyard between the old and new buildings carries secret messages encoded in copper plates outlining the CIA’s mission. (CIA photo)

  William H. Webster met Nancy McGregor’s son Ben in May 1987, just before she became his special assistant at the CIA. (FBI photo)

  William Webster equipped William M. Baker with a Sherlock Holmes outfit when Baker left t
he CIA as public affairs director in May 1989 to become the FBI’s assistant director in charge of the criminal investigation division. (CIA photo)

  The CIA and FBI jointly recruited a KGB officer in the Soviet embassy in Washington while operating out of a building at 6551 Loisdale Court in Springfield, Virginia. (Ronald Kessler)

  The CIA’s Foreign Resources Division recruited foreign diplomats and intelligence officers in the Washington area from a suite at 7101 Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda, Maryland. (Ronald Kessler)

  William M. Colby began CIA reforms. (Wide World)

  Stansfield Turner emphasized technical collection. (Wide World)

  William J. Casey embroiled the CIA in the Iran-Contra scandal. (Wide World)

  George Bush, himself a former CIA director, met with William Webster at the new CIA building for a working lunch in August 1990. At left is Richard J. Kerr, deputy director for Central Intelligence. (Wide World)

  President Bush applauded after Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor swore in Robert M. Gates as the fifteenth Director of Central Intelligence on November 12, 1991. (Wide World)

  Directors of Central intelligence

  Sidney W. Souers*

  January 23, 1946-June 10, 1946

  Hoyt S. Vandenberg

  June 10, 1946-May 1, 1947

  Roscoe H. Hillenkoeter

  May 1, 1947-October 7, 1950