After much soul-searching, Diana shared her observations with Sandy. Sandy immediately suggested to Diana that the information could be important, and that they should tell Redmond right away, which they did. Redmond impatiently listened to Diana’s remarks, as Sandy reminded him that Rick knew about every case we had lost. He had access and now he apparently had money. Redmond was preoccupied with other matters and curtly told them to go to Jeanne. He then forgot about the conversation. On her own, Diana duly approached Jeanne to repeat her story once again. Unfortunately, the day she did so was within twenty-four hours of the surfacing of the Agee false flag operation. Jeanne told Diana to talk to Dan Payne, and almost immediately became immersed in the Agee problem to the exclusion of everything else.
At this point Diana felt exceedingly frayed, but she did not give up. She went to Dan Payne to tell her story for the fourth time. Dan was busy with a number of cases, but he listened to Diana and, more importantly, took preliminary action based on her account. He started by reviewing Rick’s Office of Security and Office of Personnel files. These did not contain much of CI interest, although they revealed that in the distant past Rick had received two DUI citations. They also documented that, on two occasions in the 1970s, he had been drunk at an office Christmas party. (In those days, heavy drinking at CIA office festivities was not outside the norm. Christmas parties began in the afternoon and focused on alcohol, not food. The Office of Security had to maintain checkpoints at the various exits to the buildings, in an effort to ascertain who was too drunk to drive and to make arrangements to get them safely home. Those days are now long gone.) The security file also indicated that Rick had last been polygraphed in 1986, and that he was cleared in a single session.
Dan’s next step was to read Rosario’s operational, or 201, file. Diana had told him that Rosario had worked as a low-level agent for the CIA Station in Mexico City, both by occasionally making her apartment available for station officers to hold meetings in, and by reporting on individuals she met in the course of her duties as secretary of the local diplomatic association. More pertinent to Dan’s interest at the time was information in the file disclosing that Rosario came from a politically connected family in Colombia. Her father was a former head of the Liberal Party. Rosario’s assignment to the Colombian embassy in Mexico City was a direct appointment by Colombian president Turbay. Moreover, her father was also rector of a university, and had attended Princeton.
As part of his preliminary investigation, Dan went to the Arlington County courthouse to check on Rick’s mortgage for his new residence, but could find no record of it. Eventually he had to make two more trips to the courthouse in order to convince Jeanne that he had checked in every possible way and that the mortgage really did not exist.
Dan also initiated a routine customs check. This turned up three currency transactions, as follows:
18 Oct 1985—deposits of $15,660 cash
18 Feb 1986—deposits of $13,500 cash
1 Aug 1989—$22,107 lira exchange
None of us knew what this meant, but Dan added the information to his growing file on Rick.
While all this was going on, a ghost from the past reappeared. His name was Sergey Petrovich Fedorenko. An academic researcher with the Soviet Institute of the United States and Canada (IUSAC), he had been recruited in New York back in 1973 and run in place by the CIA and FBI until his return to the Soviet Union in 1977. The CIA encrypted him GTPYRRHIC. His FBI cryptonym was MYRRH. One of his handlers was Rick, who traveled from Washington periodically to participate in the operation.
Fedorenko was not the only CIA or FBI agent who had escaped the 1985 destruction, but these “escapees” numbered fewer than ten and were therefore of major interest in our investigation. (Much later, when we reviewed these cases as a group, we estimated that they fit one of two categories: either they were minor players who did not have access to state secrets, and were therefore not dangerous to Soviet interests, or they had been dangles in the first place. All of the evidence is that Fedorenko belongs in the “minor player” category.)
Once Fedorenko arrived in the United States in late 1989, arrangements were made immediately to recontact him. The two people chosen to handle the debriefings were Pat Watson of the FBI and Rick from the CIA. Because we in the CI Investigations Branch were highly interested in hearing what Fedorenko had to say about the twelve years he had spent in Moscow out of touch with us, we asked Rick to come down and give us a rundown on Fedorenko’s experiences. Unfortunately, what we learned did not really help. Fedorenko said that he believed he had been under suspicion, but that he had never been arrested.
The debriefings continued for some time, in a somewhat acrimonious atmosphere. Some in SE Division believed that Fedorenko was under KGB control, while others considered him a valid, if not particularly valuable, source. Jeanne and Sandy belonged to the second category. Eventually, Fedorenko settled in the United States, where he still lives today.
Throughout the affair, Rick defended Fedorenko, to the point of becoming obnoxious. Not only did he believe that Fedorenko was a bona fide asset, he also persisted in overestimating Fedorenko’s access and reporting. This led to a minor hullabaloo. Zhomov had reported on a case that could have been that of Fedorenko, although it was not a close fit. A memorandum was prepared and placed in Fedorenko’s file. The memorandum was sanitized so that no information regarding Zhomov’s identity could be ascertained. With the exception of Jeanne and Sandy, the thinking at the time was the reverse of reality. Zhomov had to be protected because he was a bona fide volunteer with information of prospective great value. Fedorenko was a plant who had to be exposed. Anyway, Rick heard about the memorandum and learned that Fedorenko’s file had been placed in a safe for which he did not have the combination. Thus Rick could not read the memorandum, even though it was pertinent to his case. This incensed Rick and he somehow managed to access the safe in question and read the report. He then wrote a rebuttal casting doubt on the theory that Zhomov’s reporting pertained to Fedorenko.
That Rick entered the safe to read the memorandum was a breach of well-understood security practices and it further set some people against him. However, he was responsible for handling Fedorenko and, given his somewhat arrogant personality, it was not terribly surprising that he took this action. And he made no effort to conceal what he had done because he promptly wrote a refutation to Zhomov’s supposed lead.
As it turned out, the CIA discarded Fedorenko based partly on SE Division management’s mistaken assessment of Zhomov’s report and partly on Fedorenko’s troubles with a polygraph examination. The FBI, on the other hand, continued to believe in Fedorenko and kept in contact with him.
While all this was going on, Dan had been diverted from his preliminary investigation of Rick. The fast-changing scene in Eastern Europe had resulted in the CIA’s recruitment of a number of new sources, some of whom provided information possibly related to penetrations of the CIA. One case that absorbed Dan’s time involved an Eastern Bloc service’s knowledge of personal details about one of our officers. How had the service in question learned this information? After an exhaustive investigation, Dan deduced that the officer in question had a relative who was working for the Eastern Bloc service and had supplied the information.
Another case concerned Karel Koecher. Koecher, a Czech national, had been recruited by his country’s intelligence service in the early 1960s. He immigrated to the United States in 1965, and became a U.S. citizen. After he received his citizenship he applied to the CIA, and was hired as a translator/transcriber with SE Division after successfully completing a polygraph. He later left the CIA because of dissatisfaction with his position, which was not commensurate with his educational background.
In November 1984, based on defector reporting, the FBI arrested Koecher. He was exchanged in February 1986 and sent back to Czechoslovakia. After the Czech Velvet Revolution in 1989 he visited the West. Dan contacted him and talked to him at some length. Dan’s i
nterest in Koecher revolved around the period that Koecher had been assigned to SE Division. Although he worked in a building outside CIA headquarters, he interacted with his fellow transcribers at the same outlying location. Some of them had subsequently moved to sensitive jobs in headquarters. The thinking was that Koecher could have supplied assessment and vulnerability information about his co-workers and that this information could subsequently have been used in a recruitment approach. Further, the Czechs might have shared this information with the KGB.1
After dealing with these diversions, Dan got back to his investigation of Rick. In January 1991 he did a credit check and found nothing unusual. (We learned later that, as luck would have it, the month that Dan chose for his check was the only month of the year that did not include any extravagant spending.) He also looked into Rick’s CIA credit union account. This also did not turn up anything out of the ordinary. What it did reveal lulled us into a false sense of security. Rick had taken out a $25,000 new car loan for his $43,000 Jaguar and was paying it off on a regular basis in amounts commensurate with his CIA salary. Presumably Rick thought that it would be easy for us to check this account so he deliberately made it look innocuous. In fact it took a National Security Letter, signed by the Director of Security, to gain access. At the time this was a very unusual step to take.
As part of his scrutiny, in December 1990 Dan asked the Office of Security to initiate a background investigation of Rick, with a subsequent polygraph. We deliberately delayed requesting this reinvestigation until January 1991 because employees were on a five-year schedule at that time. Had an investigation been launched earlier, it might have aroused Rick’s suspicions. Dan also wrote a memorandum to the Office of Security suggesting that the reinvestigation concentrate on Rick’s financial situation and spending habits. A personal history form was sent to Rick on 22 January 1991, with a request for updating. He returned it sometime in March.
The Office of Security background investigation was completed on 12 April 1991. It revealed that numerous people knew about Rick’s lavish lifestyle. All of those interviewed attributed his wealth to his spouse and her Colombian family. The comments on Rick were generally favorable, and everyone recommended him for continued access to classified information. Some noted that he occasionally drank to excess, but no one saw this as a serious problem. One person did comment that he thought Rick might be a spy, but when asked to explain this statement backed off and said “no, the profile is not right for that.” This particular individual had tangled with Rick over the value and validity of Fedorenko.
Rick was polygraphed in mid-April. Regrettably, the process was flawed in that the polygrapher did not have access to the full memorandum that Dan had written but only to a summary. Also, the background investigation results had not yet made it into Rick’s security file. During the polygraph examination, Rick freely discussed his finances. He admitted his wealth, and attributed it to his mother-in-law. He stated that he was the part owner of two pieces of land in Colombia, and was considering going into the import-export business there after retirement. He even cockily said that he was getting a “free ride” on his wife’s money.
After the first session, the polygrapher was not quite satisfied with the results pertaining to the question about Rick’s foreign contacts. Therefore, he was promptly scheduled for a follow-up session and the subject of his foreign contacts was reviewed with him. Rick explained that he had been introduced to numerous people in Colombia when he and his wife visited her family. He added that he had no idea whether any of them were employed by the Colombian security services, and suggested to the polygrapher that this might explain his reaction to the question. The polygrapher accepted this explanation and Rick was allowed to go. The question of Rick’s finances was not explored in any great depth.
In July 1991 we took a new tack. We dispatched an officer to Bogota to brief our chief there and ask him to use his stable of assets to gain further information on Rosario’s family. Bogota did what we asked, tasking one of its Colombian agents to find out what he could. A month or so later the agent reported back that the family was indeed wealthy and well connected politically. According to the agent, the family once donated land worth several million dollars for the construction of a soccer field in central Bogota. Furthermore, the extended family was involved in real estate development, and owned a chain of popular ice cream parlors.
Based on the successful polygraph and the seeming corroboration from Bogota that Rosario’s family was indeed wealthy, the Office of Security closed its file on Rick. We in the Counterintelligence Center did not follow suit because we still had our suspicions. However, he was only one of the individuals we were looking at closely.
The CIA mole-hunting team (left to right): Sandy Grimes, Paul Redmond, Jeanne Vertefeuille, Diana Worthen, and Dan Payne. (Authors’ collections)
Paul Redmond, Deputy Chief of SE Division, later Deputy Chief of the Counterintelligence Center and senior member of the mole-hunting team, Washington, DC, 1988. (Courtesy of Paul Redmond)
Diana Worthen with a photo spread of some of the CIA and FBI sources who were executed as a result of Ames’ treachery. (Authors’ collections)
Dan Payne with his chart of Ames’ monthly bank deposits from unidentified sources during 1985-91. That income totaled $1,326,310. (Authors’ collections)
Rick and Rosario Ames on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, 1984. (Courtesy of Diana Worthen)
Walt Lomac, SE Division branch chief, making the most out of his exile to Africa for his defense of General Polyakov, 1969. (Courtesy of Walter Lomac)
Walt Lomac is finally recognized for his stand in the Polyakov case in a 1979 medal presentation ceremony. George Kalaris, Chief of the Counterintelligence Staff 1974–76 and Chief of SE Division 1976–79, is the presenter. (Courtesy of Walter Lomac)
In retirement, SE Division officers Dick and Louise C with “friends,” Montana, 2006. (Courtesy of Louise and Dick C)
Burton Gerber, Chief of SE Division, 1984–89, and wife Rosalie, Washington, DC, 1988. (Courtesy of Burton Gerber)
GRU General-Major Dmitriy Fedorovich Polyakov, the highest-ranking Soviet intelligence officer ever to spy for the United States during the Cold War. Ames’ treason in 1985 led to Polyakov’s arrest in 1986, execution in 1988, and burial in an unmarked, unknown grave. (Authors’ collections)
GRU General Polyakov and wife Nina at a diplomatic reception, New Delhi, India, 1970s. (Authors’ collections)
Ever the avid sportsman, General Polyakov proudly displays the meal of the day, ca. 1970-80. (Authors’ collections)
Polyakov family, Moscow, mid-1960s (left to right): son Aleksandr, father Dmitriy, son Peter, and mother Nina. The Polyakovs’first child, also a son, died in the early 1960s. (Authors’ collections)
General Polyakov and wife Nina (far right) during a gathering with neighbors at their dacha—a peaceful, retired life outside of Moscow, 1980s. (Authors’ collections)
KGB officer Leonid Georgiyevich Poleshchuk and wife Lyudmila, Kathmandu, Nepal, ca. 1973. Poleshchuk was executed in 1986 after Ames named him as a CIA agent. (Courtesy of Andrei Poleshchuk)
Leonid and Lyudmila Poleshchuk with son Andrei at the Kievski Railroad Station, Moscow, September 1983. (Courtesy of Andrei Poleshchuk)
Official Soviet death certificate for KGB officer Leonid Georgiyevich Poleshchuk. Date and place of death are given as 30 July 1986, Moscow. The space on the form for cause of death is left blank. (Courtesy of Andrei Poleshchuk)
THE INVESTIGATION GETS NEW LIFE
IN EARLY 1991 JEANNE HAD TO FACE that her career was beginning to wind down. She was scheduled for mandatory retirement at the end of 1992. The Counter-espionage Group of CIC was about to get a new chief. Ray Reardon, with whom she had worked productively for more than four years, was returning to the Office of Security to fill a senior position. Jeanne did not want to continue as deputy chief under a new chief, and was not eligible for the chief’s position because the slot was
“owned” by Security. Considering her options, and plagued by a sense of guilt that she had not solved the problem of the 1985 losses, she approached the head of CIC, Jim Olson, and asked him if she could spend the time remaining before her retirement taking another look at what had gone wrong. Jeanne envisioned working as a singleton, with an emphasis on analysis. This was soon to change.
Paul Redmond joined CIC in April 1991, as deputy to Olson. On one of his first days in the center, he and Jeanne went down to the FBI to deliver a sensitive memorandum to Ray Mislock, chief of the Soviet section of the intelligence division, and his deputy, Bob Wade. During the course of conversation, Paul mentioned that Jeanne was planning to revisit the 1985 problem, with the hope of gaining new insights. Wade immediately remarked that they—the FBI—would like to buy into this project. Shortly thereafter it was agreed that the FBI would designate a special agent, Jim Holt, and a senior analyst, Jim Milburn, to work on the undertaking.
Holt and Milburn were excellent choices. Both were serious, low-key individuals with whom it was easy to work and to share cramped spaces, and neither seemed to have an ingrained dislike of the CIA. Jim Holt had been the case agent for Martynov, and had a visceral interest in trying to find out who had betrayed him. Jim Milburn was the FBI’s top analyst on the Soviet target. Unfortunately, while he was respected for his knowledge, his system did not adequately reward him because he was an analyst, not a special agent, and therefore a second-class citizen. (Even as of 2006, this appeared to be a continuing problem in the FBI bureaucracy. Serious efforts have been made to upgrade the role of analytical personnel but one does not yet find them in major managerial positions. This being the case, it is easy for management to disregard their findings when these findings are inconvenient.)
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