Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  We prided ourselves on our language skills, which made navigating the cultural divides, not to mention recruiting foreign agents, far more manageable. In Rome, speaking Italian also enabled us to enjoy and understand the country’s incredible cuisine. I grew up believing that tomato sauce needed to cook all day and that there was only one recipe—a couple of cans of Hunt’s tomatoes, a can of tomato paste, a teaspoon of sugar along with a dash of salt, pepper, and garlic. It remained my favorite sauce until I tasted authentic Italian cooking. Later on, I learned that the key to Italian cooking is using fresh, natural ingredients. When I think about my favorite sauce, I probably come back to the basic pomodoro and basil recipe, which goes well with just about anything. A very close second, particularly as a specialty, is spaghetti in the black ink of squid. It is hard to find on the menu, even in very good New York Italian restaurants, because the squid ink sac must be fresh and spoils easily. I was delighted to find a similar risotto dish at my favorite local Italian restaurant in New York, Cellini, in Midtown, run by Dino Arpaia.

  Besides the great cuisine, there was wonderful opera. Pat and I had become opera lovers in Argentina, which is renowned for the Teatro Colón, one of the world’s best acoustical opera houses. One of the lovely ways to enjoy the opera in Rome during the summer is at the Caracalla Baths, an outdoor site that in ancient Roman times accommodated as many as five thousand bathers. The ruins of the baths remain, with the addition of a huge stage constructed under the stars. It is a marvelous experience to witness Verdi’s Aïda performed with live animals, including, on special occasions, elephants and horses. Our contacts in Italy were flattered by our interest in Italian opera and invited us one season to opening night at the famous La Scala opera house in Milan. It was an extraordinary event, not only listening to great opera, but also observing the cognoscenti decked out in capes and tiaras. The Italians take their opera seriously and are vocal in their appreciation of and displeasure with the performers. One has to be brave to sing at La Scala.

  Far to the south, in Naples, I was involved in another bit of theater that required some fortitude—landing on the deck of the USS Forrestal. Ambassador Peter Secchia convinced the U.S. Navy that it would be a good idea to arrange for a group of us to land on the deck of the aircraft carrier when its port call was Italy. I took my seat on the airplane next to a Roman Catholic priest, who turned out to be Cardinal John Foley from Philadelphia. A close mutual friend from our hometown, Dick Doran, had been urging both of us to meet each other in Rome. At the time, Cardinal Foley was serving as the Vatican’s director of communications, and over the months ahead, we became good friends. The plane touched down on the carrier deck with a jolt that I braced myself for. The whole experience—landing an airplane on a ship bobbing in the ocean—was fascinating and memorable.

  It had been my hope during my assignment in Rome to get a private audience with Pope John Paul II, who had had a great deal to do with encouraging democracy in Eastern Europe. I was reluctant to infringe on my friendship with Cardinal Foley, but once, when I mentioned that Pat’s and my wedding anniversary was approaching, he suggested that we celebrate with a private Mass with the Pope.

  Shortly thereafter, we received instructions about where Pat, our son, Conor, and I should go in the Vatican, very early in the morning, to be escorted to the Pope’s private chapel. About twelve people had the same privilege that day. The dress code for men was business coat and tie, but the women were required to have their heads covered. When we walked into the small chapel, the Pope was kneeling in prayer in front of the altar. It was a solemn and special occasion for all of us. After the Mass, we were placed in a semicircle, and the Pope proceeded to walk around and address each person individually in his or her own language. When he reached me, he asked me in perfect English an unexpected question: Where do you work? My mind raced—do I lie to the Pope, or break cover and identify myself as the CIA station chief? “Your Holiness, I work for the U.S. government,” I said, with slight hesitation, having found an inspired answer that allowed me to avoid lying to the Pope or failing my next polygraph. I thought I detected a knowing smile on the Pope’s face.

  Italian cuisine, the opera, a private Mass at the Vatican—all this contrasted with what I will always remember as the dark side of my time in Rome: Rick Ames. He constantly reminded me that the spy game could be a hall of mirrors (and as far as Ames went, of course, I did not yet know the half of it). I had been told at headquarters before I left that he had a drinking problem and had been brought back from Rome to Washington to dry out. A later inspector general’s report on how Ames had been able to function inside the Agency as a KGB mole for nearly a decade would conclude that he had been known to drink during lunch and sleep at his desk. But now he was back in Rome and reportedly sober. One of the first things I did when I arrived was call him in to address the issue head-on. I told him, “Rick, you’re a potentially talented officer and I know you’ve had a drinking problem, but I’m not going to tolerate it if you start drinking again. If there’s any backsliding, you’re out of here.” He apparently was staying sober because his wife was pregnant, and he was on relatively good behavior. Nevertheless, I asked my deputy, Doug Hokenson, a first-class officer and experienced operator, to keep an eye on him as well. This was hard to do, since Ames was located in a separate area. I knew that it was important to check up on him, so I would from time to time seek him out in the afternoon and stand very close to him, as I would with my teenage children, to see if I could detect any liquor on his breath. I never did. But a question I’ve asked myself many times was whether it might have been a mistake to alert him to the fact that we would be watching his drinking. He was smart enough to stay out of our presence. At the end of the day, I would do it again, because the alternative of ignoring the issue would have been worse. Of course, years later the irony wasn’t lost on me. While I was saying, “Shape up, try harder, you’ll be successful,” he was probably thinking, “You have no idea how successful a Soviet spy I am,” as he went about stealing U.S. government secrets.

  Not long thereafter, we took a ride together because he wanted to show me some of the Soviet installations in Rome. It seemed like a positive gesture, but I had an eerie sensation that something was wrong, although I couldn’t put my finger on it. I couldn’t imagine at that time that he would betray his country, the Agency, and his family and friends. By that point, at least ten of our best Russian agents had been arrested because of Ames’s betrayals, and the KGB was systematically executing them. Ames was the only one inside the CIA who knew how the Russians had identified the agents. He never seemed troubled that he had, in effect, issued death warrants for these heroic men. The only thing that occasionally worried him was getting caught—and during his days in Rome, he was concerned that the KGB’s aggressive moves against those whom he had betrayed might get him caught.3 By then, he had deposited more than $1 million in blood money from the KGB into a secret Swiss account. However, as time went on, Ames’s concerns apparently seemed to fade.

  Upon my arrival, Doug Hokenson, who started in Rome before me, informed me that Ames, during Alan Wolfe’s tenure, had a pattern of failing to file routine reports on what he was doing and whom he was seeing. “Rick,” I told him, “you’re going to produce, and if you don’t produce, I’m going to be on your case.” Hokenson and I stayed on him and nagged him—where’s your report, whom did you see, where is your accounting this month? He complied, but slowly and resentfully. Hokenson and I were determined to keep Ames on the right path; inattention to small tasks can result in serious breaches. After he was caught, and the Agency started reviewing everyone who had managed him, the investigation team noted that we had been on his case on these issues.

  My final encounter with Ames involved an Eastern European government official who walked into the station and offered his services as a spy. Most of the time, you have to work hard and be visible if you want to find assets. If you are out there moving around, they will find you; you cannot
just sit around and wait for them to knock on your door. But in truth, many of our best assets were “walk-ins,” people who simply walked into our embassies and volunteered to work for us. We sent Ames to do an initial interview with the Eastern European official, code-named Motorboat. In his book Confessions of a Spy, Pete Earley provides a bizarre account of the case from Ames himself. Among several authors to write about the Ames case, Earley was the only one able to interview the spy extensively.

  Ames told me that after he met with Motorboat, Jack Devine asked him to arrange for Motorboat to be taken to a safe house so that he could be debriefed. “I was dead set against it,” Ames said, “because I thought it would put Motorboat at risk … I said, Well, Jack, you are just going to have to order me to meet with him, because I don’t think it is safe. And Devine told me, Well, I think it is worth the risk, and he sat down and wrote a memo to the file, saying that I didn’t want to do it but he was ordering me to do it.”

  Ames told me that he was required to meet Motorboat at a safe house. “I must admit it was a very strange situation for me to be in,” Ames said. “Here I was, I mean, I was working for the KGB, right, and here I am interviewing —— who is telling me about a penetration of our government by a U.S. citizen, someone who the KGB had under its control. It was a rather weird situation.”

  Ames told me that he later passed everything that he had learned about Motorboat to the KGB. “Only a few days earlier, I was arguing strenuously with Jack Devine about putting Motorboat in danger. Now, I was telling the KGB all about Motorboat. All I can say is that I had been genuinely worried about protecting Motorboat at the moment when I was arguing with Devine. It is just another sign of how compartmentalized I was.”4

  Ames’s comment about being compartmentalized is oddly self-serving and nonsensical. And he tells only half the story. His concern for Motorboat’s safety is ludicrous, as he himself notes, since Ames gave him up to the KGB several days later. His operational concerns about putting Motorboat at risk by taking him to a safe house were equally so. We regularly met assets far more sensitive than this Eastern European, and in places considerably more hostile than Rome. It is my strong view that with proper tradecraft, the CIA should be able to conduct a secure meeting just about anywhere in the world. But Ames didn’t tell Earley the entire story. I also told Ames to polygraph Motorboat, which is standard operating procedure for assessing the veracity of agents and controlling their behavior. Polygraphs are usually administered in safe houses, far from the public eye. It’s now clear why Ames wanted to avoid polygraphing Motorboat and came up with a flimsy excuse not to do so.

  Under duress, Ames ultimately did conduct a polygraph examination of Motorboat over the weekend, and the polygraph operator reported that there were indications of possible deception in Motorboat’s initial answers. My policy when deception was indicated was clear: come back to the station, report the results, and ask for guidance. Simply readministering the test only further distorts the results, but this is what Ames did, in violation of my guidance. I learned this Monday morning from the polygrapher who had conducted the tests. I was livid and angrily marched down the hall, got in Rick’s face, and yelled, “What the hell do you think you were doing?” He had a lame excuse, but I detected for the first time what I thought was a high level of resentment and superiority. While he didn’t say it—because he was at heart passive-aggressive—I felt he was thinking, “How dare he challenge me. I understand the Soviets and their Eastern Bloc allies far better than he ever will.” And then I saw the flash of resentment in his eyes. It was an Ojo moment, as the Latins say—watch out. I didn’t understand exactly what the look meant at the time, but it sent out a negative brain wave. When the mole hunters at headquarters came to see me much later, it all started to make sense. Not long after this encounter, Ames departed Rome for an assignment in Washington.

  * * *

  Shortly after arriving in Rome, I combed through the station’s files on everyone we’d had relationships with, going back a number of administrations. This is something I did routinely with every new posting. While doing this, I identified an old contact, not an agent, who was a very experienced politician, having served in the government in different positions over decades. He was a reservoir of wisdom and understanding about Italian politics. Meeting with him also gave me a good opportunity to work on my Italian over a relaxed lunch. He always ordered the same thing—spaghetti basilica, which is basically spaghetti with tomato sauce and basil. He would proceed to sprinkle it with freshly crushed dried red pepper. He was convinced that it was the best and purest traditional Italian pasta. Over time, I came to the same view. We met every three to four months during my stay in Rome. While he was extremely well-informed, he gave no indication that he was still personally heavily involved in day-to-day politics.

  The other unforgettable figure from my years in Rome was my Italian counterpart. Although he was highly regarded and powerful, he lived humbly. He came to our house several times and on occasion insisted on bringing the pasta sauce himself. This annoyed Pat to no end, as though he were suggesting she didn’t know how to prepare sauce, but we let him do it because it was part of the rapport building that cements a special relationship.

  Needless to say, the locals had exceptional on-the-ground surveillance and technical capabilities in Italy that enhanced our local presence—most of the time. Surveillance and countersurveillance are art forms. They can involve anything from small two- and four-man teams to complex operations involving large numbers of personnel. The FBI and Britain’s secret service have often run them on this scale, with overhead flights, tracking devices, and concealed cameras. Certainly the Russians know how to mount massive surveillance operations in Moscow.

  On any given day, anywhere in the world, an intelligence officer can become the subject of surveillance—to his everlasting embarrassment if he doesn’t pick up on it. In this environment, officers are trained to develop a pattern of behavior over time that allows them to identify hostile surveillance. This must be done in a natural way, so whoever is watching the CIA officer can’t figure out what he is up to and is not tipped off that the officer is carrying out a clandestine operation. Looking in the windows for reflections and bending over to tie your shoe is only for the movies and is a dead giveaway to surveillance teams.

  Officers are trained to look for a natural route—known as an SDR, for surveillance detection route—that allows them to maintain routine travel patterns, all the while trying to draw out the surveillance team. This is best done using a combination of walking, mass transit, and taxis that will greatly complicate a relatively light surveillance team. Even a good team loses its target with more frequency than is generally realized. It also is useful to build in patterns that bring an officer face-to-face with a surveillance team—for example, entering a store and then heading back the way he came in. Sometimes spies spend hours on an SDR to break away from surveillance for a few minutes or hours in order to carry out a clandestine operational task.

  The most important thing is to let your inner ear speak to you. If an intelligence officer is under regular surveillance, he can actually become accustomed to feeling its presence. There’s never any foolproof means of detecting it, so officers must remain vigilant at all times. The lazy operator who cuts corners runs huge risks of detection. Before I went overseas on my first foreign tour, I sat in on the debriefing of the military attaché to the U.S. embassy in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. Lieutenant Colonel Donald J. Crowley had been kidnapped one Easter Sunday, off the capital’s polo grounds, by members of the Dominican Popular Movement (MPD) and held for two days before being released in exchange for the release of twenty MPD members being held in Dominican jails. In his debriefing, Crowley described the ordeal in detail: how he was blindfolded and thrown to the floor of a speeding vehicle while his abductors held a gun to his head and, as in a game of Russian roulette, repeatedly pulled the trigger with empty chambers in the pistol. What grabbed my att
ention most, though, was the way he described the days before his kidnapping. As he left his house for his daily run each morning, he sensed something unspecific wrong in the environment. He couldn’t pinpoint it, but his inner antenna told him something was amiss. This reinforced a belief I already had—that, when abroad, it’s important to trust your instincts. If something doesn’t feel right in the environment, stop and recalibrate. With each successive foreign posting, this lesson was affirmed, over and over again.

  During my tenure in Rome, we would take pains to clean ourselves of surveillance when we were meeting somebody we didn’t want the Italians to know about. It wasn’t that we were trying to penetrate their government, but if we were going to meet a sensitive source from out of the country or local hard targets, we wanted to do it “in the dark.” Even as chief, I had to be careful in any clandestine meeting I had in-country. I devised SDRs and followed procedures by the book. I did not want the Italians knowing whom I was meeting with, particularly since you always had to take seriously the possibility that the local intelligence service might have been penetrated by hostile forces. Once, I was surprised to learn from sensitive sources that the Italians had actually put heavy surveillance on me. Fortunately, it was a day that did not include a sensitive meeting. I was curious about why they might be zeroing in on me. Sometime later we learned that they were concerned that on that particular day I might come across their first sensitive meeting with Russian intelligence. Up until then, the Italians had had no formal relationship with the Russians. They were worried that I might accidentally spot the meeting. I hadn’t spotted the surveillance that day, because I wasn’t looking for it. I wasn’t carrying out any unilateral acts, so I did not use an SDR. It was an important reminder that you can come under friendly surveillance for defensive reasons, and that you can never let down your guard.