At the same time, Paul telephoned Sandy and asked her to participate in the project. He was aware of her intention to resign from the Agency and knew that only an opportunity to determine how and why we lost General Polyakov and the others would keep her working. She arrived in late May 1991 and the two Jims came in June to complete the group, which we named the Special Investigations Unit of the Counterintelligence Center, or CIC/SIU, which reported directly to the CIC front office, specifically Paul Redmond. For all practical purposes, Dan Payne was also a member of our little coterie, although on paper he still belonged to the Counter-espionage Group. More and more of his tasking came from us as time went on.
Our spaces were cramped, and not conducive to free conversation because we were located in the middle of the Counter-espionage Group, which was not privy to our investigation. Jeanne had a real office, with a door and floor-to-ceiling walls, but it was only ten feet or so square. It contained a desk with a computer workstation, three chairs, a credenza with a small printer, and a two-drawer safe. We had to crowd ourselves in any time we wanted to have a discussion, and the last person had to sit on the safe. If Redmond joined us, an inverted wastepaper basket functioned as an additional seat. Sandy and the two Jims had workstations in adjoining cubicles outside.
As a security measure, our computers were connected to a private local area network, not to the CIA mainframe. We did, however, have one computer nearby that we could use to access the CIA network in order to send and receive e-mail, do name traces, etc.
Although other possibilities still had not been ruled out, the group decided to concentrate its efforts on trying to identify a human penetration of CIA. As a first matter of business, we asked the Office of Security to draw up a list of Agency personnel who, by virtue of their positions in 1985, could be expected to know about the CIA’s operations against the Soviet target. This was simply a mechanical effort, based on manning tables, and the list at its most extensive totaled 198 persons. However, once Sandy and Jeanne took a look at it they realized that they could do some immediate paring. Because of their knowledge of who was who and what was what in SE Division at the time, they were able to identify those who, although they were slotted in key jobs, actually were elsewhere. Also, numerous individuals from the Reports Group were listed. A little checking revealed that these individuals could not have been privy to information about the sourcing of the reports they handled. In this way the list was whittled down to about 160 Agency employees who, at first glance, had at least some access to information about one or more of the sources who had been compromised.
Because it is of course impossible to investigate 160 people without an army to do the job, it was necessary to effect some stringent prioritization. The method Jeanne developed has received a substantial amount of criticism, although no one has been able to articulate a better solution. First of all, Jeanne and Sandy did some further paring, removing from the list a few people whom they subjectively believed were unlikely to betray their country. Then they submitted the new, smaller list to a vote. Those who voted included Sandy, Jeanne, the two Jims, Paul Redmond, Jim Olson, Fran Smith, John O’Reilly (who at the time was the CI chief in SE Division), and Wade and Mislock. We asked them to list five or six individuals who needed to have a hard look taken at them—people who made them uneasy for one reason or another. Further, they were asked to list the one they worried about most first, and to rank the others in descending order. Wade and Mislock were asked to vote simply as a public relations overture. We realized that they did not have enough information about the individuals on the list to enable them to make reasonable choices.
When the lists were all received, Jeanne and Sandy weighted them numerically, giving six points for every time a name was mentioned first, five points for every name that was mentioned second, and so on. They then added up the numbers accorded to each person and, lo and behold, Rick Ames’ name led the list. He received twenty-one points. However, the compilation also showed that several individuals had received fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen points. Our consensus was that we should start our investigation by concentrating on all of those who received fifteen points or more. We reasoned that if we concentrated just on Ames and he turned out not to be the mole we would have wasted a substantial amount of time. Anyway, it was far too early to narrow our options that much.
Of those who voted, only Sandy gets the gold star. She listed Ames first. Redmond also listed him first but, in his typical anarchic way, prefaced his contribution by saying that it was in no particular order. Jim Olson had Ames in second place while Jeanne had him only in fourth. The FBI votes did not match closely with those of the CIA participants, but this is understandable given their lack of background at this point. Somewhat later, the four of us in CIC/SIU voted again. All of us listed Rick as one of our candidates, and he again led the list numerically. Jeanne was beginning to see the light, because she moved him from fourth to second in priority.
While we had culled our first-cut list to a manageable few, we did not forget all the other employees who had had some access. We asked the Office of Security to have their personnel read all 160 security files and notify us if any contained information of CI significance. Further, we requested that those on the list who had not been polygraphed since the beginning of 1985 be subjected to such an examination. Eventually this project was completed, although a few people were never polygraphed because they were overseas, or retired, or had resigned.
We gave personal attention to the individuals on our short list, starting with their Office of Personnel and Office of Security files. Much of this review was carried out by Jim Holt, who also conducted FBI traces. Eventually, we also had the resident psychologist in CIC review the Office of Medical Services holdings on these individuals.
As a matter of policy, employees have medical confidentiality. We could not examine these files ourselves, and we were only provided oral briefings on the results of the reviews. For some arcane reason, the FBI was not allowed to be present at the psychologist’s briefings, which were attended only by Sandy and Jeanne. However, we were permitted to brief our FBI colleagues on what the psychologist had told us, and indeed did so. Also, the psychologist was not allowed to tell us what the files contained unless the information was pertinent to our CI investigation.
Fortunately, the review did include results of psychological testing, and some of the findings were of decided interest. The reviewer made use of what is known as the Project SLAMMER profile. Project SLAMMER was an inter-Agency effort to develop a profile of those U.S. citizens who have committed espionage. Those who had been convicted of this crime were subjected to in-depth psychological interviews in prison, if they were willing, as most were.
The results of the file review did not reveal Ames to be the person who fit the SLAMMER profile better than anyone else. However, there were some interesting items that added to our holdings on him. The psychologist who interviewed him in 1967, at the time when he was applying for the Career Training Program, characterized him as “sheepish” and unsure of himself. He was not highly recommended for the program. After additional testing several years later, he was described as having undergone some changes. According to the test results, he had learned to put up a front and hide his thoughts.
Concurrently, Jim Milburn started a review of the compromised cases. Although the FBI knew about these compromises, and had been given summaries and chronologies of them starting in 1986, they had not previously had access to the files themselves. Now these were made available to them. In return, Sandy and Jeanne were invited to go to FBI headquarters and review any of their files that might be germane to the investigation. However, we were inundated with work at the time and never got around to doing so. In any event, these files had already been reviewed once by the two Jims and we trusted their thoroughness.
One of the criticisms leveled at Jeanne after the wrap-up of the Ames case was that she did not want to provide information to the FBI. That is certainly not tr
ue. Jeanne does plead guilty to not wanting to lose control, however. She and her group strongly believed that CIA experts were in a better position to uncover a traitor within their own organization than FBI outsiders would be. (By the same token, they realized that the FBI would be in a better position to identify a spy in their midst than would Jeanne, Sandy, or any CIA CI officer.) We were afraid that the FBI would gallop off in the wrong direction and we would not be able to influence their activity. Thus we were content with the way the situation evolved during the next eighteen months.
As part of our many-pronged investigation, we drew up a list of those KGB officers who we believed might have knowledge of a human penetration of the CIA, either because they were in key positions in 1985 or because they were experienced CI officers with a good command of English. This list eventually comprised some 60-70 names. We then started to review their operational (201) files. Our review was mainly geared to compiling information on any foreign travel, whether for temporary duty or permanent assignment.
As part of the review, we tried to identify any aliases the selected KGB officers may have used in their operations, plus any awards or out-of-cycle promotions they might have received. We hoped that, when we had settled on a small number of suspects, we might be able to match travel of one of these suspects to travel of someone on our KGB list. Jeanne was always skeptical of the utility of this endeavor because we had been able to collect only a very few of the aliases used by this target group. She and Sandy believed that a KGB officer who traveled on such an operational mission would do so in alias. If we did not have the alias, we could not match up the travel with that of a CIA officer. We further believed that a CIA officer traveling to meet his KGB handler would make a serious effort to conceal his itinerary.
As it turned out, however, Jeanne and Sandy were wrong. The KGB, and later SVR, officers who traveled to meet Ames generally did so in alias, but for some reason one of them used his true name on a trip to Bogota. We were able to ascertain that he was there at the same time as Rick because Rick had not tried to conceal his travel, merely providing an innocuous explanation by saying he had to help his mother-in-law with some problem. This concurrent travel was another item that increased our suspicions of him, although of course it did not prove conclusively that he was a spy. The search for travel patterns was one aspect of the investigation in which we asked, and received, NSA assistance.
While we were drawing up the list of key KGB officers, we became more and more frustrated by the changes that were taking place in SE Division operational conceptions and the deleterious effect they might have on our investigation. Under the overly rosy assumption that the KGB was no longer an important adversary and that our future friendly relations with Russia would include a productive liaison relationship with the KGB’s successor, the division began to send out messages to our overseas stations downplaying the importance of the KGB target. Stations were told that, if a KGB officer approached them and during the first contact appeared to have information of significant interest to the U.S. government, it was all right to debrief the volunteer on a “cash-and-carry” basis before showing him the door. Long-term relationships were discouraged, and asylum would not be considered. The message was clear: running well-thought-out operations against the KGB target was no longer a career-enhancing activity. Stations reacted accordingly. (The author of two of the guidance messages was Rick Ames. However, Sandy and Jeanne do not see anything sinister about this. He was told to write the cables by Division Chief Milt Bearden, and the content reflected the current operating philosophy as determined by Bearden.)
One salient example of the results of this doctrine was described by Paul Redmond in his unclassified book review of The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.1 Mitrokhin was a KGB archivist who brought thousands of pages of valuable notes to the West. He volunteered twice to the Americans, was turned away, and then went to the British who recognized him for the gold mine that he was.
Another list we compiled was a combined FBI-CIA rundown of all reporting from any source since the 1970s on the subject of possible penetrations of the CIA. This compilation ran to some twenty pages. While this had to be done, it was not very useful in the overall scheme of things. Most of the reporting was vague, or was provided by sources who did not know what they were talking about. They did not have direct access to this type of information, or were prone to embellishment, or simply wanted to please their debriefers.
As a follow-on to this compilation, the two Jims began a series of rebriefings of defectors and in-place sources. All of them had been asked when we first got in touch with them, whether they knew about any penetrations of the U.S. government. Now they were debriefed in more detail, and with more subtle questions about awards, promotions, alias travel, etc. This turned up some intriguing tidbits, but nothing that aided us substantially in our search.
Another failed avenue of investigation involved Rosario’s father’s will. It will be recalled that Diana Worthen had told us that Rosario did not appear to have any money except for her salary in 1983, when she was stationed in Mexico City. Yet, according to Rick, it was his wife’s money that enabled him to lead a cushy lifestyle. We discussed this anomaly several times. One theory we developed was that perhaps Rosario’s father had kept a tight grip on the family purse strings. When he died, which we knew had occurred at the end of 1983, Rosario’s mother probably gained control of the family wealth and may have had more liberal views of sharing it with Rosario.
To test this theory, we needed to gain access to the father’s will. Unfortunately, as we learned, wills in Colombia are not public documents and are not available in a central location. They are deposited with a notary. Bogota was believed to have more than two hundred notaries. We made a conscious decision not to follow this investigative trail any further. We reasoned as follows: Rosario’s family, whatever its financial status, was prominent in Bogota and had a certain amount of name recognition. Further, an individual sometimes chooses a notary the way he chooses a lawyer. That is, one goes to a relative, a college friend, or someone else with whom he has at least a nodding acquaintance. If the news ever got back to Rosario’s family—and subsequently to Rick—that we were trying to hunt down the will, it might totally sink our efforts. At this point, there was no warrant out for Rick’s arrest. He had two valid passports. If he got wind of what we were doing, he would simply flee the United States for Colombia, and laugh at us from his comfortable condominium in Cartagena. Anyway, this is one of the points Congress freely criticized us about, but we would make the same decision today given the same choices.
One of the most fruitful, if lengthy and time-consuming, projects was that of interviewing a number of CIA employees who had been in key positions as of 1985. This project made the FBI somewhat nervous because the term “interview” means something specific to them as an investigative technique. To assuage their uneasiness, Jeanne and Sandy promised that, should any interviewee begin to make incriminating statements, they would immediately leave the room and the FBI could take over the conversation. What we had in mind, however, was merely to ask these people if they could help us in our research. We asked all the interviewees the same questions, covering such mundane things as: Who picked up the sensitive Restricted Handling cables from the front office each morning? Who had access to which safes? Could conversations be heard between cubicles? Were they aware of any security violations during the period?
We never tried to keep our investigation a secret. Indeed, we hoped that someone would come to us with helpful information. However, only two people did—Diana and a person who had pertinent information about one of the other people who could have been the mole. This latter individual turned out to be guilty of various forms of misbehavior that in a more tightly run Directorate of Operations would have led to his dismissal. He also had money beyond his salary, and owned at least three expensive cars. However, as far a
s we could determine, he was not a spy.
In the end, we interviewed some forty people. They included both persons about whom we had not the slightest suspicion, and people who were on one of our lists. Among those we interviewed was Rick Ames. It would have raised suspicions not to interview him because he had been in a key position in the 1983-85 period. Two things stood out about this interview. First, when Rick was asked about security violations, he mentioned that he had left his safe open one night. We already knew this because the violation was a matter of record in his security file. He pointed out that the safe in question had contained paper on many of the cases that had been compromised and the combinations for all the safes in his branch. It was normal for him to mention this event, because this was the sort of thing we were asking about. However, he brought up the subject again later in the interview, somewhat out of the blue. This caught Sandy and Jeanne’s attention and they regarded it as overkill. He seemed to be hinting that perhaps some unidentified individual had gotten into the safe, and that that someone was the mole.
The second thing that stood out in this interview was Rick’s reaction to the next-to-last question. We asked everyone: If you were going to betray CIA secrets to the KGB, how would you go about it? We also included subsidiary questions, such as: Would you identify yourself? Would you prefer a one-shot deal or a continuing relationship? Would you be deterred by the knowledge that you are subject to periodic polygraphs? While the main purpose of this series of questions was to get additional ideas about possible scenarios, the secondary aim was to help educate our FBI colleagues as to how the mind of a CIA officer was likely to work.
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