Many of the people we posed our questions to were case officers, adept in role playing. They entered into what was to them a game, coming up with a variety of imaginative stratagems. One told us that he would go to a sub-Saharan capital he was familiar with. He said he knew the local service had an observation post across the street from the Soviet embassy, but they were only interested in identifying their own citizens who entered the embassy. Being Caucasian, he thought that he could enter the embassy and no one would think twice about it. Another officer told about how he had previously been stationed in the Far East and knew one of the local KGB officers from the diplomatic social circuit. This particular KGB representative had impressed our officer by seeming to be intelligent, open-minded, and not a drinker in the Soviet sense. Our officer knew that this Russian was again overseas and he thought that, given his favorable past impression, he would make his approach to him.
Both Sandy and Jeanne thought that Rick’s response to the question was out of character. Rick can be quite articulate when engaged, and he can think on his feet. However, he hemmed and hawed, providing a somewhat hesitant and lukewarm response. In retrospect, he was melding some things he actually had done with others that he had not. To him, unlike to the others, this was more than a game. For instance, he said that he would make his approach overseas whereas in reality he had dealt directly with the Soviet embassy in Washington. On the other hand, he said that he would identify himself, and this is indeed what he had done. He further stated that he would not be deterred by the polygraph, and this turned out to be the case.
The last question we asked everyone was: What do you think happened in 1985? Some thought that there had been a human penetration of the CIA, some thought our problem had been technical, and others came up with various permutations and combinations. Rick, when asked for his opinion, mentioned Ed Howard, and then posed the rhetorical question: How long is the arm of coincidence?
At one point in this phase of the investigation, we became seriously sidetracked for a while. We received a report from an officer in one of our overseas stations that he had been in contact with a KGB officer, and that this KGB officer had told him that the KGB was running a mole inside the CIA. As the story was told to us, the mole was an ethnic Russian who had served in Moscow. Based on this report, we began to concentrate on CIA employees who fit the parameters of this lead, although we did not completely discontinue examining information on those employees, such as Rick Ames, who did not. Eventually we discovered that there were major flaws in this story, and that it probably was a total fabrication.
During this same period we also received some misleading reporting from Sergey Papushin, the defector from the KGB’s internal CI component, to the effect that this component was running a CIA officer who had been assigned to Moscow. In other words, there was some similarity between Papushin’s statements and those recounted in the above statement. Unfortunately, Papushin had a severe alcohol problem, which shortly thereafter caused his death. We ultimately decided that his reporting could not be relied upon. We then started to refocus on our short list as originally compiled. However, we had lost valuable time.
AMES EMERGES AS A MAJOR FOCUS
IT IS HARD TO ISOLATE A SPECIFIC TIME FRAME when we became more and more focused on Ames. This was a gradual development. To the end, we never lost sight of the other individuals on our short list. However, as time passed Ames began to consume more of our daily attention. For easy reference, Dan Payne christened him with the informal cryptonym JOYRIDE, chosen because of the remark that Rick had made during his polygraph to the effect that his wife had money and he was getting a free ride.
A salient activity in our hard look at Ames was Sandy’s creation of a chronology of his whereabouts and activities. This started as an informal reference, listing a few facts of Rick’s career just for convenience. It ended up as a text-searchable word-processing document more than five hundred pages long, mind-numbing to compile and even more mind-numbing to read, but of high value to the investigation as it unfolded. Indeed it directly led to the major breakthrough in the case in August 1992.
The chronology included information from Ames’ official Office of Security and Office of Personnel files plus other available material. The greatest volume of input came from an electronic search. It is possible to capture text from the CIA’s electronic files going back many years. We asked that all these files be searched for Ames’ true name and aliases, and that we receive the output in printed form. (Officers in the Directorate of Operations are assigned pseudonyms, always consisting of a first name, middle initial, and last name, for use in Agency traffic. This system was originally developed so that employees would not know each other’s identities, which added a degree of security to our operations. However, in practice most DO personnel know both the true name and pseudonym of their colleagues.)
We no longer remember how many thousands of documents resulted from this search, but Sandy had stacks and stacks of paper to wade through. The search produced not only pertinent and peripheral documents about Rick Ames, but also any communication naming any other Agency employee whose first, middle, or last name was Ames, any reference to Ames, Iowa, plus all mentions of the Ames Building, a complex in Roslyn, Virginia where the Agency had office space. In between other projects, Sandy spent months reading through this material and adding anything to her chronology that she thought might be useful.
Another large block of data that was added to the chronology consisted of Ames’ badge ins and outs. Agency personnel are all issued plastic badges and have to insert them into a machine at building exits and entrances. For many years it has been possible to print out all the comings and goings of any employee. We got such a list from the Office of Security, and more months were spent by Sandy inputting Ames’ exits and entrances. This produced a picture of Ames’ daily habits. He rarely came to the office on time, he rarely stayed late, and even more rarely worked on a Saturday. Unfortunately for Sandy, he was a heavy smoker and during the later part of the period under review employees were not allowed to smoke in the building. Therefore many of the exits and entrances in Sandy’s rundown were nothing more than cigarette breaks.
As it happened, however, one part of Ames’ pattern turned out to be of great importance to the FBI after they took over the investigation. It was obvious that Ames was not a morning person and usually did not show up at the office on time. This pattern was occasionally broken and Ames would show up at perhaps 0730. When the FBI was trying to ascertain on which days Ames had had indirect contact with his KGB handlers, by loading or unloading a dead drop or by making or observing a signal, they eventually deduced that he did so early in the morning. There was a correlation between Ames’ early arrivals and his operational activities as detailed in the CIA’s chronology.
When Sandy went through Ames’ personnel file early in her project, she found references in his 1984-85 annual evaluation (called a PAR, or Performance Appraisal Report) to a sanctioned contact he had with two Soviet diplomats in Washington, DC. This was not surprising because in those days it was common for SE Division officers assigned to headquarters to conduct assessments of local Soviet officials. This was done under the watchful eye of the FBI, which simply did not have the manpower to cover everyone at the Soviet embassy and ancillary offices. The FBI therefore allowed, and sometimes encouraged, CIA officers, usually in alias and with a fictional persona, to fill the gap by building up social relationships with these targets. As is normally the case, for legitimate security reasons the PAR was not very specific.
When Sandy started processing the electronic search of official traffic, she was able to fill in some of the particulars and, of key importance, to identify the two Soviets with whom Ames had been in contact. Their names were Sergey Ivanovich Divilkovskiy, a press counselor at the embassy, and Sergey Dmitriyevich Chuvakhin, an arms control specialist. Considerable details, some of which were quite startling, emerged when Sandy pulled their operational files. (It shou
ld be remembered that most of what was in these files was derived from Ames’ reporting, and is not necessarily accurate or complete. In a later chapter, we will outline what really happened between Ames and the Soviets, as opposed to what we learned from the files.) The FBI suspected Divilkovskiy of being affiliated with the KGB. Further, some vulnerabilities had surfaced in his family life. Therefore, he was of interest to the FBI as a possible recruitment target or as a CI threat to be countered.
Ames had a few lunch or drink contacts with Divilkovskiy before the latter returned to Moscow at the end of 1984. According to the file, Ames asked Divilkovskiy if he knew a Soviet colleague who would like to meet an American businessman to exchange ideas now that Divilkovskiy was leaving. Divilkovskiy gave Ames Chuvakhin’s name and Ames duly reported to the CIA and FBI that he intended to call Chuvakhin in an effort to develop a relationship. Because Chuvakhin was not a KGB or GRU officer, and nothing in his personal life seemed to offer a “hook,” the FBI did not pay particular attention to him. He was a natural object of interest to the CIA, however, because he presumably possessed information of importance to our government.
Ames, in the alias he had used with Divilkovsky and the same story about being an out-of-town businessman, first tried to set up a meeting with Chuvakhin in early 1985. Chuvakhin did not seem to be very interested in contact with Ames, but he agreed to a get-together for drinks at the Mayflower Hotel on 16 April 1985. However, Chuvakhin did not show up. According to the file, Ames went to the nearby Soviet embassy to ask Chuvakhin if there had been some mix-up. He had a short chat with Chuvakhin and then left. CIA officers were not supposed to visit the Soviet embassy for any reason without first informing the FBI, because the FBI had an observation post covering the entrance and tried to identify all unknown visitors. However, Ames did call the FBI later that day to apologize and explain that he had gone in on the spur of the moment because he was frustrated by his unsuccessful efforts to touch base with Chuvakhin.
The next contacts between Ames and Chuvakhin, duly reported by Ames, took place in May. They consisted of a meeting at the embassy for drinks on the fifteenth and a lunch on the seventeenth. Further contacts continued in June and July. Then Ames’ reporting ceased, although there were indications that the relationship continued and the FBI had asked more than once for updates. One possible explanation that occurred to us was that Ames, caught up in the time-consuming and high-priority task of debriefing Yurchenko and writing up his notes for impatient consumers, plus making last-minute preparations for his wedding to Rosario, and processing for his overseas assignment to Rome all at the same time, had just not had time to file his accounts of his meetings with Chuvakhin. This was not out of line with Ames’ usual practices. He had been chastised in the past for being delinquent in submitting required reporting. Yet it was an oddity worth noting. The last relevant item in Chuvakhin’s file was a cable to Rome that reached there just as Ames arrived in July 1986, almost a year after the non-reported meetings had started. The cable asked once again for Ames’ account of any contacts with Chuvakhin, but it was never answered.
Sandy further discovered that Ames had followed somewhat the same pattern in Rome. He had some contacts with a Soviet embassy official named Aleksey Khrenkov. These contacts were spread over the three years of Ames’ tour, but the reporting was desultory and contained gaps.
Concurrent with Sandy’s compilation of Ames’ daily activities, Dan Payne, urged on by Paul Redmond who let his impatience boil over because he believed that we were not proceeding with sufficient speed, had started spending almost full time pulling together information on Ames’ finances. Using National Security Letters, which were signed by the Director of Security and which requested the addressees to provide information on Ames without disclosing to him that this was being done, Dan contacted the banking and credit card institutions where Ames had accounts. The institutions complied with the letters and Dan soon had great masses of financial details to organize into a coherent picture. Unfortunately, as the law read at the time, brokerage houses were not mentioned. Although Dan made a determined effort, he was never able to convince Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and others to give him their records. He also never got a list of Ames’ foreign dealings, although we knew that he had an Italian bank account while stationed in Rome and that during the same period he had opened an account with Credit Suisse in Switzerland. He was also believed to have bought property in Colombia.
Dan entered his collection of Ames’ financial records into a computer spreadsheet. Like Sandy’s endeavors, this was a tedious job because he had acquired not just monthly statements but all the supporting minutia such as canceled checks, deposit slips, and credit card slips. It soon became clear that, even though some of the puzzle pieces were missing, extremely large sums of money were passing through Ames’ hands.
Dan sat behind Sandy in an adjoining cubicle. After he finished putting his data into the spreadsheet, he passed the accumulated bits of paper across the high barrier separating their desks. Sandy would then look over the collection of bank and credit card statements to decide which items warranted inclusion in her chronology. Not wanting to make her compilation more unwieldy than it already was, she decided not to input the more humdrum items such as grocery bills and other routine purchases. What she was looking for were any indications of travel or activity outside his routine, any purchases of computer equipment, and any big-ticket or unusual expenditures.
In August 1992 Sandy hit pay dirt. Dan had been logging deposits into Ames’ checking account and that of his wife. As he finished with the slips, he passed them to Sandy as was their practice. When Sandy input the deposits into her chronology, she discovered three correlations between meetings with Chuvakhin and subsequent deposits, as follows:
17 May 1985—Ames lunches with Chuvakhin
18 May 1985—Ames deposits $9,000
2 Jul 1985—Ames lunches with Chuvakhin
5 Jul 1985—Ames deposits $5,000
31 Jul 1985—Ames lunches with Chuvakhin
31 Jul 1985—Ames deposits $8,500
To Sandy this was an epiphany. She told us what she had found, then sped to Redmond to fill him in. Her excited announcement to him was: “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell what is going on here. Rick is a goddamn Russian spy.”
As for the rest of us, it took some time for the significance of Sandy’s discovery to set in. The FBI especially had another mole candidate whom they favored. However, gradually we began to understand that we had found the first link that would eventually lead to Ames’ arrest and conviction. (Much later in the investigation several other deposits, suggesting further correlations, were found. Unfortunately, we did not have the full picture in the fall of 1992. We had asked the FBI to search their files for information on any contacts between Ames and Chuvakhin, and also to review the telephone tap coverage of the Soviet embassy. The first part of this tasking was accomplished but FBI headquarters balked at the review of the telephone coverage, explaining that this would be a very labor-intensive undertaking and that they could not justify it unless they opened up a formal investigation.)
Not long after Sandy’s epiphany, Dan completed his financial research. Even without counting the assets for which we had been unable to obtain records, from 1985 to 1991 Ames had a total income of more than one million dollars from unidentified sources. To be precise, the figure amounted to $1,326,310.
By now 1992 was drawing to a close and so was the five-person SIU investigation. Jim Milburn began to draft a final report. This was an official FBI document and, although we had a say in the draft stages, the final wording was not under our control. The report was issued in March 1993. As we understand it, it did not pinpoint Ames as the primary suspect, but included a short list on which Ames’ name appeared. It was formatted this way because Milburn and his colleagues did not want to place FBI investigators in a box where they would have to devote all their attention to Ames without considering the other most likely �
��possibles.”
Professionally and personally for Jeanne and Sandy, this was one of the darkest times in the entire mole hunt. They were totally convinced that Ames was the traitor the team had spent two years looking for and that analysis proved the case. They also knew that the FBI did not share their conviction and would continue to focus on other persons on the short list. They could envisage the possibility that Ames would fall into a bureaucratic black hole and never have to face the criminal justice system. Rather, he would retire from the CIA at his convenience, and spend the rest of his life enjoying an opulent lifestyle paid for with the blood money he had earned.
Luckily, in 1993 additional information became available. This new information, while it did not identify Ames, pointed in his direction. It added to the comfort level of those who had not been convinced by the results of our analytic efforts and forced the FBI to open a full-scale investigation of Ames, as outlined in the next chapter.
THE FBI TAKES OVER
ON 12 MAY 1993, THE FBI OPENED a full investigation of Ames. The operation was code-named NIGHTMOVER and run out of the Washington Metropolitan Field Office, then located in a rundown section of town called Buzzard’s Point. Les Wiser Jr. was chosen to be the FBI supervisory special agent in charge of the case. Wiser, a quick and imaginative thinker with a law degree and counterintelligence experience, was a good choice. Whatever may have been his feelings about the CIA, he was open with us and pragmatic enough to ask for our help when necessary to get the job done. We also had a collegial relationship with three of his top aides, Rudy Guerin, Mike Donner, and Del Spry, and of course the two Jims continued to be active in the investigation as it unfolded. On the analytic side, Danielle Lunden served as a valuable member of the team.
At the FBI headquarters level, our cool but correct contacts with Tim Caruso continued. A veteran of the FBI’s unsuccessful ANLACE probe, he was assigned to head up what was called PLAYACTOR, the FBI’s independent look at the 1985 compromises, which was being carried on at the same time as CIC/SIU’s scouring of the same evidence. The only upside to PLAYACTOR was that we became acquainted with Mike Anderson, Caruso’s deputy, who understood counterintelligence and who was a team player. When possible, we preferred to deal with him rather than with Caruso.
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