—Jack Platt, former CIA officer
Just as I was leaving for Moscow in May, an incident took place that helped push Ames toward his momentous decision. On May 19, four days after I first met Ames in the Soviet embassy, the FBI arrested John Walker Jr. after he left a package of classified U.S. Navy documents in a paper bag by the side of a Maryland road outside Washington. He’d been under surveillance by scores of FBI agents and a small plane overhead.
A retired submarine sailor and communications specialist, Walker headed a family spy ring that worked for the KGB for eighteen years. He was first run by Oleg Kalugin, then serving in Washington under cover as press secretary. Walker’s ring included his brother Arthur, his son Michael—a sailor on the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier who provided the contents of the paper bag—and another communications specialist and old navy friend, Jerry Whitworth. The ring gave the KGB top secret navy communications and codes intelligence that enabled us to decode vital command messages. Walker himself handed over reports on submarine operations, noise-reduction technology and operational manuals in addition to keys for unscrambling navy communications.5
The arrest marked the biggest exposure of KGB agents since the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg nuclear espionage scandal in the 1950s. For Americans, news about Walker marked the beginning of the so-called Year of the Spy. Ames worried that whoever had fingered Walker would turn him in too. The FBI claimed Walker’s estranged ex-wife betrayed him. But until that version became public, Ames suspected Martynov, the KGB Line X officer in Washington. Ames turned out to be right: by unbelievable chance, Martynov had overheard a conversation about Walker in Yasenevo while on break in Moscow and informed his FBI handlers when he got back. Most published accounts differ dramatically by relying on the FBI’s version pinning Walker’s exposure on his ex-wife. But while she may indeed have had an important role, Martynov played the crucial one, something documents from his trial support.
Ames has been characterized in the American press as an alcoholic and a mediocre officer who committed treason to make up for personal and professional inadequacies. Milt Bearden, Ames’s former boss at the CIA, sums up the general opinion of his colleagues by calling him a “miserable little bastard.” Others who knew him disagree.
Aldrich Hazen Ames was born in rural Wisconsin in 1941, the son of a mediocre CIA officer who served in Burma in the early 1950s. The young Ames drank a lot after dropping out of the University of Chicago, and his driver’s license was suspended after his third drunk-driving violation. Still, Ames did apply himself as a new CIA agent. After serving his first tour abroad in Turkey, he studied Russian in Washington and was picked by Haviland Smith, then head of the SE division’s Latin America branch, to help handle a young KGB officer named Alexander Ogorodnik. Recruiting Ogorodnik in Colombia after learning about an affair he was having, the CIA code-named him TRIGON. In 1974, Ogorodnik was transferred back to Moscow, where he provided hundreds of diplomatic cables and internal reports.
TRIGON was arrested in 1977 and committed suicide by swallowing a CIA-provided cyanide pill hidden inside a fountain pen. He had been fingered by one of two Czech illegal agents: Karl and Hana Koecher, a husband and wife spy team living in Washington.
“Illegals,” as opposed to “legals” like me and others who officially worked in rezidenturas abroad, were deep undercover agents planted in foreign countries, many as immigrants. They had complicated legends that took years to create. Often remaining inactive for years while they established themselves as respectable members of foreign societies, they ordinarily worked alone.
Karl Koecher was a translator in the CIA’s SE division. He and his wife earned notoriety for their swinging lifestyle and orgies in Washington and New York, sometimes including other CIA employees. Arrested in 1984, they were eventually traded for Soviet dissident Anatoly Sharansky.
In 1972, Smith gave Ames another agent to handle. The new target, code-named PYRRHIC, was Sergei Fedorenko, a brash young Soviet U.N. diplomat and expert on guided missiles. Smith recruited Fedorenko after the Russian approached a fellow weapons expert in New York, asking for an introduction to the CIA. Fedorenko was soon spying for the Americans, passing on information about the KGB’s New York rezidentura and the Soviet weapons industry. Fedorenko exposed his U.N. colleague Valdik Enger as a KGB officer assigned to pressure him into providing the service with intelligence about his U.S. contacts. (Enger and fellow U.N. secretariat employee Rudolf Chernyaev were later arrested by the Americans for espionage.)
Ames and Fedorenko became friends. Although Ames once stumbled by falling asleep in a subway car—temporarily losing a briefcase with photographs of KGB staff that Fedorenko had provided—he was soon promoted and sent to the New York office. Manhattan was crawling with intelligence officers. The United Nations employed some seven hundred Soviets, providing cover for the hundreds of KGB and GRU officers. The FBI assigned hundreds of special agents to follow suspected Soviet officers. The bureau also worked closely on some cases with the CIA, which maintained a large Manhattan office.
Soon Ames was given another important agent, Arkady Shevchenko, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations. When Shevchenko contacted the CIA in 1975, asking to defect, the agency persuaded him to remain at the United Nations and work as an agent instead. Code-named DYNAMITE, he informed the Americans about Politburo debates over relations with Washington and other sensitive information. He finally defected in March 1978, helped by Ames.
After Ames moved to New York, Jack Platt gave him yet another agent to handle. Ames met Platt in Grand Central Station’s Oyster Bar, a famous drinking hangout, to discuss the plan. Not friendly with Ames, whom he considered abrasive, Platt was concerned the handover wouldn’t go well, which was often the case when he didn’t know the new handler. To his pleasant surprise, this one went well. Taking Platt’s advice about running his new target, Ames showed he understood the work.
After New York, Ames was posted to Mexico City and then returned to Washington in 1983 as counterintelligence chief in the SE division. The new position gave him access to most of the agency’s sensitive Soviet cases. Nevertheless, he was passed over for bigger promotions—despite the important agents he’d handled in New York. He was less successful in recruiting new agents, and sometimes careless. He drank too much, and colleagues complained about his shabby clothes and lax personal hygiene.
He also had financial problems, having collected debts of almost $40,000. And his wife, Nan, was suing him for divorce. Meanwhile, he’d fallen in love with a young Colombian woman, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, who called herself Rosario. They met during Ames’s posting in Mexico, where she was working as cultural attaché for the Colombian embassy. The couple married in August 1985.
At some point, Ames began thinking of espionage as a solution to his financial problems. He knew that a Russian source had tipped off the CIA about several KGB double agents who had approached U.S. intelligence with bogus offers to spy for Washington. Thinking of ways to contact the KGB, he stumbled on the idea of telling us about these double agents. By turning them in, he’d be able to demand payment but wouldn’t harm the CIA or its real agents.6 The $50,000 he asked for in his first letter to the KGB would solve his immediate problems. In time, he’d have enough to vastly improve his modest lifestyle.
Members of a CIA and FBI taskforce assigned to hunt for a mole later claimed that Ames gave himself away by spending extravagantly and failing to hide his KGB income. But the commonly accepted story—that clues about his wealth eventually led the CIA to him—are untrue. Ames showed much more cunning than he’s usually given credit for, except by the knowing.
Back in 1985, other problems were troubling him too—the ones he mentioned to me during our meetings in the embassy and at Chadwicks. He was incensed by the paranoia of former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who betrayed the agency, Ames felt, by exposing American spies he thought were double agents working for the KGB. Among them were TOPHAT and FEDORA, wh
o came to public attention in leaked press reports in 1978. Ames also criticized the CIA for misleading Congress and the American public. To boost the agency’s significance and demand more federal funding, it exaggerated the Soviet threat. Helpless to do anything about it, Ames grew angry.
Shortly after Yurchenko redefected to Moscow, Platt ran into Ames in a Langley hallway. Platt mentioned some information about Yurchenko he’d learned from a fellow CIA officer who had seen him in Moscow. It would have been easy for Ames to pass the information along to us, but he didn’t even ask Platt the name of the CIA operative in Moscow. Platt would surely have answered a casual question about that. Ames simply didn’t care to inquire about such low-level tradecraft—or he was careful to show no curiosity that might have given him away.
3
In 1985 Ames met Chuvakhin about once a month. In May, he provided a number the FBI used to identify one of its sources inside the rezidentura—agent 1285. Ames said the bureau was using that mole to channel false information to the KGB.
The intelligence led us to Line X officer Valery Martynov. Ames also exposed former Washington rezidentura officer Sergei Motorin, who posed a lesser threat because he’d been rotated back to Moscow. Fingering those two U.S. agents in the Soviet embassy helped establish Ames as an important, well-positioned agent. Although cutting off CIA access to information about the rezidentura was also a way of protecting himself, his willingness to divulge information grew after he became convinced that we too were concerned about his security. John Walker’s arrest pushed him to consider further protecting himself by exposing most of the CIA’s major agents. Sensing his quandary, I played on it during our meetings.
One of his concerns was routine CIA lie detector tests. Training him to pass the tests significantly boosted his confidence in our ability to protect him. Part of our coaching came in four pages of instructions for anticipating the questions he’d face and reacting to them. The recommendations had been drafted by a special KGB clinic in Moscow set up in the 1970s after Soviet officers and agents began having trouble passing American tests. While Soviet and U.S. technology was similar, testing methods differed. In the Soviet Union, only the test administrator was present during an examination, with others eavesdropping from another room. In the United States, several people were often present in the room, possibly making it more difficult to beat the test by increasing a subject’s psychological pressure.
Polygraphs measure a number of indicators, including respiratory and heart rates, perspiration, voice level and other movements. The KGB lab’s recommendations included how to control physical reactions. Exercises such as yoga improve response management. Drugs also help control physical indicators, as does answering indirectly and playing around questions.
But such tactics are only general measures. Ames’s biggest hurdle would be answering standard questions designed to detect foreign agents—such as, Have you recently met a KGB officer? If a subject isn’t psychologically prepared to lie, it’s important to create conditions that could explain a wrong or suspicious answer. That’s why three other officers and I met Ames at a Washington café in May. There was no question that the FBI would observe us. Although Ames knew he wouldn’t be meeting Chuvakhin alone, he played along, acting surprised to see me when I walked in. Chuvakhin introduced us. Exchanging business cards, we talked for about ten minutes. Then I left, and Chuvakhin and Ames moved to another table to continue their conversation. Now our agent could truthfully answer he’d met a KGB officer. He took the test in the spring of 1986 before a new posting to Rome. Making use of our meeting, he passed.
Running Ames proved relatively easy. We planned dead drop sites and a system of signals to indicate warnings or schedule meetings. However, during the first year we didn’t need to use the ordinary means of communication. We already had an ideal one—through Chuvakhin, a perfectly legitimate interlocutor for Ames. As per their routine, the two spoke about disarmament, Congress, the latest news—“innocent” subjects. Then Ames would hand over a packet of press releases for Chuvakhin and a package of documents for us. Chuvakhin would reciprocate with wads of hundred dollar bills. After the first $50,000 payment, Chuvakhin regularly handed over $20,000 to $50,000 in cash. We told Ames he’d be paid an additional $2 million, to be deposited in a Soviet bank.
Unaware that the KGB was using him to communicate with an agent, Chuvakhin believed he was facilitating a back-channel diplomatic line between Moscow and Washington. His real role came to light only after Ames was arrested in 1994. Ironically, the post-Soviet Russian administration didn’t appreciate Chuvakhin’s service to the Motherland. He was fired from his Foreign Ministry job by Andrei Kozyrev, the westernizing foreign minister. Completely unaware of his role until then, Chuvakhin was furious. He blamed me for setting him up and refused to meet with me again.
4
The list of CIA informants Ames provided at Chadwicks on June 13 depressed me deeply. Kryuchkov was also taken aback, although he managed to control his reaction. The presence of so many spies deep inside the KGB reflected poorly on him. The potential disaster was worsened by Yurchenko’s defection in August, a major blow that threatened to unseat Kryuchkov as FCD chief.
Instead of telling his bosses in the Politburo that a CIA mole had identified eleven American spies, provided corroborating information about others and informed on several CIA eavesdropping operations in the Soviet Union, the head of intelligence took the credit himself. Kryuchkov made it appear that the exposures resulted from hard work by the KGB under his leadership. In return, he received laurels instead of criticism.
To make his story plausible, Kryuchkov had to arrest as many of the agents as he could, as quickly as possible. In his bid to reverse his fortunes, he kept even Rem Krassilnikov—the SCD general who masterminded the arrests—in the dark about the real source of the tip-offs he used to wrap up the CIA’s Moscow operations. Kryuchkov’s ploy worked, and he was soon made KGB chairman and given a coveted spot in the Politburo. Later he tried to hinder Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform policies before taking part in an attempt to topple him. All the while, he knew that I knew how he got to the top, and he held it against me.
Among the first U.S. agents arrested in 1985 was KGB Major Sergei Motorin, one of the two moles in the Soviet embassy in Washington betrayed by Ames. The son of a high-ranking Party official, Motorin was a hulk of a man, a big jock and a ladies’ man who ran no agents and knew almost no secrets. In 1980, a persistent FBI agent followed him to an electronics store in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where Motorin tried to buy an expensive television and stereo on credit. He was turned down because of his diplomatic immunity. But after Motorin left, the FBI convinced the store owner to help entrap him by suggesting he pay part of the price with cases of Russian vodka, which he could obtain duty-free. When Motorin returned with the vodka, an FBI video camera caught him on tape.7 Confronted with the evidence, Motorin faced the prospect of losing his job if exposed or, worse, being charged with “speculation,” the Soviet term for engaging in private enterprise. Finally recruiting him, the FBI gave him the cryptonym GAUZE.
Later, I was able to pinpoint when Motorin was enlisted, thanks to the unusually heavy FBI communications chatter we intercepted that day. It came from a group of surveillance cars operating near the office of the Novosti news agency, where Motorin worked. When he went downtown, the FBI followed him in force. We couldn’t figure out what prompted such interest in Motorin, so Dmitri Yakushkin asked him about it after he returned to the rezidentura. Motorin said he had no idea. Yakushkin advised him to be especially alert in the future and to inform the rezidentura about anything in the least bit suspicious.
That Motorin wasn’t brave enough to report the recruitment pitch against him eventually had tragic repercussions. The FBI and CIA began feeding him false information to convey to the rezidentura. His espionage continued until 1984, when he was rotated back to Moscow and demoted to section A, planting propaganda against the West. To throw off the Americans af
ter his arrest, he was ordered to call a woman with whom he’d had an affair in Washington and assure her everything was fine. The ploy deceived the CIA and FBI, which were no doubt anxious about his disappearance. It was the kind of suspicion-dispelling move we tried to make each time we arrested an American agent.
Colonel Leonid Polishchuk, another agent betrayed by Ames, became the subject of an ornate story fabricated by the SCD. When posted to Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1974, Polishchuk visited a casino and gambled away all the money allotted to him by the KGB. Stepping in, the CIA offered a loan to cover his losses before he was found out by his superiors. Polishchuk took the money and later agreed to spy in return. Before the end of his tour, the CIA (code-naming him WEIGH) trained and equipped him to spy from Moscow.8 But that was the last the CIA heard from him until he was assigned as a Line KR officer to Lagos, Nigeria, in February 1985. The CIA approached him again, and he resumed spying until he was exposed.
Polishchuk had long wanted to buy a Moscow apartment near his parents, and the SCD arranged for just such a place to become available. The CIA deposited the 20,000 rubles he’d need in a hollow rock in the capital, near the Severyanin railroad station. He was arrested on his arrival in Moscow. Meanwhile, a story was circulated inside the KGB and eventually leaked to the CIA and FBI: The Second and Seventh departments had stumbled on a great find while following a CIA officer. The KGB officers spotted the American loading a dead drop—the fake rock. They then waited patiently to see who came by to unload it. It was Polishchuk, of course. To embellish the account, he was said to have been drunk when arrested at the drop site. It was Martynov who first passed the information to the FBI, saying he’d heard the story from Androsov, who had just returned from a trip to Moscow.9
The Center didn’t net all the agents Ames betrayed. GRU Colonel Sergei Bokhan spied for the CIA for ten years, informing it of at least two attempts to sell us American military technology. Posted in Greece in the 1970s, Bokhan (code-named BLIZZARD) exposed CIA officer William Kampiles, who walked into the Soviet embassy offering to sell the manual for a U.S. spy satellite.10 In 1984, Bokhan informed the CIA that a Greek agent had sold the GRU plans for the Stinger missile.
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