For CIA, One of Its Worst Nightmares

Aldrich Hazen Ames, the highest-ranking active CIA official ever arrested as a Russian spy, disclosed to Moscow the identity of at least one U.S. agent, was involved in the debriefing of the controversial Soviet defector Vitaly Yurchenko in 1985 and would have been in a position to disclose a broad range of U.S. secrets to Moscow, officials said Tuesday.

Ames personifies one of the CIA’s worst nightmares and the plot of dozens of spy novels: a Soviet “mole” burrowed into the agency’s counterintelligence branch, the very office designed to unmask double agents.

For several years during the mid-1980s, Ames’ job was to recruit Soviet citizens to spy for the United States. From 1983 to 1985, when he is accused of beginning his espionage activities, he was chief of the Soviet counterintelligence branch in the agency’s Soviet/East European division.

While Ames’ alleged activities may not arouse the same fears now that they would have inspired during the Cold War, both current and former officials said his espionage still could have caused extensive damage.

“We may not have the questions of cosmic war and peace we used to have but the reality is Russia remains a country with more than 30,000 nuclear warheads,” said former CIA Director Robert M. Gates. “If the allegations are true, this is very serious.”

“I can’t think of a guy who I’d rather have in my pocket,” said former CIA official George Carver.

“It was the same job Kim Philby had when he ran Section 9 of the British secret service,” Carver added, referring to one of the most notorious defectors of the Cold War era. “It’ll take a bureaucratic generation to repair the damage.”

Another intelligence expert formerly with the CIA offered an equally bleak assessment: “He had access to the most sensitive data of all. He would have had all of the operational details in terms of the identities of our people there (in the former Soviet Union) and how we went about our business.

“This is very damaging material. The only thing worse would be if the Russians had gotten (U.S.) codes. But this guy must have unlocked a lot of secrets for them.”

Others were quick to dispute that assessment, however, saying that--while the allegations against Ames are serious--the damage would not devastate U.S. intelligence as the Philby defection had in Britain. “This is high level, but it’s nothing like Philby,” said former CIA Director Stansfield Turner.

“What it tells us is that the KGB hasn’t been reformed yet,” Turner added. “It may have been divided up but it sounds like it still has a lot of autonomy, spending this kind of money, running this kind of operation.”

Despite the relatively friendly relations between the United States and Russia over the last several years, government officials have continued to assume that Russian spy agencies were actively recruiting U.S. agents, just as American intelligence has continued its spying.

In 1992, Yevgeny Primakov, Russia’s intelligence chief, offered to stop spying against the United States if the CIA would stop spying against Russia. But the CIA turned the offer down. The Americans did not believe the Russians would keep their end of such a bargain and, in any case, did not want to give up their ability to gather information about Russia, officials said.

Primakov’s chief deputy, Lt. Gen. Vadim Kirpichenko, said last October: “Russian intelligence does no more in the United States than American intelligence does in our country.”

American officials have taken much the same line. “He doesn’t tell me everything he’s doing and I don’t tell him everything I’m doing,” CIA Director R. James Woolsey said in a December interview, referring to his periodic conversations with Primakov.

Indeed, while the military tension between the two nuclear superpowers may have eased, their arsenals have only been reduced, not eliminated. If anything, the Russian motivation for commercial and industrial espionage has increased as the country tries to reconstruct its economy.

In the continuing battle of spy versus spy, officials were publicly silent about the extent of the damage they believe Ames had caused, saying only that his activities are still being assessed. Some officials suggested that at least in the last two years--when, according to court papers, Ames’ telephones were tapped and his movements monitored--he could have been fed false information for his Russian contacts.

But the court papers and statements by current and former officials indicate that the known damage was broad. As an official in counterintelligence, Ames could have had access to the identities of many U.S. agents. He also could have had access to a broad range of information about U.S. counterintelligence activities.

Perhaps the worst case of damage attributed to Ames so far involves blowing the cover of a U.S. agent within the KGB’s counterintelligence directorate--effectively one of Ames’ counterparts within the Soviet spy bureaucracy. According to an affidavit filed in connection with Ames’ arrest, FBI agents who entered his house secretly last October discovered computer records indicating that in December, 1990, Ames had disclosed to the Russians “the identity of a CIA human source.”

The agency has declined to name the Russian or to indicate what happened to him. A number of American agents in Russia have been killed over the last decade, officials have said. But at least until now, some of those deaths had been blamed on other U.S. double agents, including Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA agent who fled to Moscow, and Clayton J. Lonetree, a former Marine guard at the Moscow embassy.

Ames’ involvement with the notorious Yurchenko case may have been equally damaging, a senior intelligence official suggested.

Yurchenko, whom U.S. officials identified as the highest-ranking KGB agent in North America, defected to the United States in 1985 and was interrogated by U.S. agents for three months before slipping away from his CIA handler at a Georgetown cafe and returning to the Soviet Union.

Ever since, some U.S. analysts have questioned whether Yurchenko was an authentic defector who acted erratically because of depression over personal affairs--the position taken officially by the CIA and FBI--and have suggested that he could have been a Soviet plant intended to deflect U.S. suspicions of a mole within the CIA.

Yurchenko identified Howard as a Soviet agent but assured American officials that Moscow had no other agents currently in the CIA, U.S. officials said at that time. According to the affidavit submitted in connection with Ames’ arrest, U.S. officials now believe that Ames already had begun his relationship with the KGB at that point.

Times staff writers Doyle McManus, Ronald J. Ostrow and Jim Mann in Washington and Sonni Efron in Moscow contributed to this story.