Kremlin Spy Suspect Eluded CIA Safeguards

Aldrich Hazen Ames passed CIA polygraph tests in 1986 and 1991, even though he was allegedly on Moscow’s payroll at the time and actively working to compromise U.S. intelligence agents and operations, officials disclosed Wednesday.

During the same period, according to sources, he successfully deflected the CIA’s curiosity about how he could afford a lifestyle far more lavish than his federal salary could support by saying that his Colombian-born wife had family wealth--an assertion that apparently went unchecked for some time.

These revelations and others go to the heart of the central puzzle of what officials now concede may be one of the most disastrous breaches of security in U.S. history: How could an intelligence officer with access to some of the nation’s most sensitive information--including the names of CIA sources inside the former Soviet Union and details of their operations there--have eluded detection for years, even though his conduct and lifestyle seemed to cry out for examination?

The answer, as pieced together from government sources and others familiar with the CIA, seems to lie in a combination of bureaucratic shortcomings and--at least at the beginning--an overreaction to a period in the CIA’s history when its internal counterintelligence unit went to such extremes in its search for possible traitors that careers were blighted and reputations were stained on mere suspicion.

Also, Ames’ lifestyle and conduct were apparently more restrained during his early years as a Russian mole than they became toward the end, officials said.

Intelligence specialists were quick to note that there is no perfect system for ferreting out leaks. “It will happen again because you can’t devise a foolproof system,” said Roy Godson, a counterintelligence specialist at Georgetown University. “No one in the history of the world has developed a perfect system.”

Still, there was near-universal agreement among the experts that the Ames case raises profound questions about the adequacy of the CIA’s system.

Part of the problem seems to have been misplaced confidence in the polygraph. One source said Ames had dismissed lie detectors as unreliable--and he may have proved it.

“They rely on the polygraph too much,” said Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA during the Jimmy Carter Administration. “It’s a fallible instrument. People can be trained to beat the polygraph, and they do.”

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official, said a series of Cuban double agents (recruited by the United States as agents, but actually under the control of the Cuban intelligence service) managed to pass polygraph examinations.

“This was in the mid-1980s, and it was a terrible embarrassment,” he said.

Moreover, although CIA procedures call for regular re-examination of officers, such tests are heavily backlogged.

Many analysts said another significant part of the problem can be traced back more than 20 years to the time when a controversial CIA officer named James J. Angleton presided over the agency’s counterspy program.

Angleton was a fanatic on the subject of security, and he became convinced--to the point of obsession, according to critics--that a Soviet mole existed within the agency.

His extreme methods and convoluted theories about KGB penetration became so controversial within the agency that he was forced to retire in December, 1974, by then-CIA Director William E. Colby.

That was a decade or more before Ames began working for the Kremlin.

But inside the CIA, former officials and other sources said, the reaction against what were seen as the abuses of the Angleton era caused a swing away from aggressive counterintelligence activity.

“Angleton so ruined counterintelligence that it’s never been the same,” Turner said. “He built such a paranoia that people have realized that counterintelligence did some terrible things in the past, and that makes them gun-shy about what they do today.”

Some knowledgeable sources, including Robert M. Gates, CIA director in the George Bush Administration, said the agency recognized the problem and moved to correct it in recent years. Indeed, they said, tightening and improving the system contributed to the discovery of the alleged betrayals by Ames and his wife.

The CIA’s screening methods begin with polygraph examinations and background investigations of all employees when they join the agency, an official said. Every five years, a new investigation is conducted, including the polygraph. But only the recent five-year period is covered, rather than re-examining the employee’s entire life.

And it appears that, at least until fairly recently, these examinations did not always probe deeply into the financial backgrounds and lifestyles of agency personnel.

Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his committee wants to find out why Ames did not become a suspect until 1991--six years after he allegedly began spying for the Soviets and receiving payments that eventually exceeded $1.5 million, according to an FBI affidavit.

‘There’s clearly something very wrong here, and we should review it,” DeConcini said.

When CIA investigators first raised questions about Ames’ finances, “his cover was that his wife was from a wealthy family,” DeConcini said. “If it had been up to me, I would not have been satisfied with that answer.”

DeConcini contended that none of the recommendations of a special panel appointed by his predecessors to improve national security provisions had been put into effect.

Those recommendations, issued in 1990 and incorporated in proposed legislation, failed to attract strong support after the Berlin Wall came down and espionage fears diminished, a congressional intelligence source said.

Ames not only drove a Jaguar while ostensibly living on a government salary of about $68,000 a year but paid cash for a half-million-dollar home and ran up more than $450,000 in credit card bills over a period of several years, according to government allegations.

However, sources familiar with the Ames case said it was his spending and banking of large sums of money that led investigators to single him out of a larger group of CIA employees who had access to secrets that they feared had been sold to the Soviets and later to Russia.

“If you’ve narrowed it down to 10 or 15, and one of them has this financial situation, it’s an eye-opener,” said Skip Brandon, who retired last month as acting assistant director of the FBI’s intelligence division. “The financial picture was an important part of this investigation. It really was.”

According to an FBI affidavit made public Tuesday, Ames, and his wife, Maria Del Rosario Casas Ames, who was also charged with espionage conspiracy, deposited $1,538,685 in their Virginia bank accounts between 1985 and this month, none of it derived from CIA salary checks.

From April, 1985, through last November, Ames’ take-home salary totaled $336,164, but he and his wife spent four times that amount--at least $1,397,300, FBI Agent Leslie G. Wiser Jr. said in the affidavit.

Cannistraro said that about two years ago, a KGB defector helped spark the investigation that eventually led to Ames when the defector told investigators that the agency had been penetrated.

Times staff writers Jim Mann and Michael Ross contributed to this story.

* U.S. SEEKS TO AVOID RIFT: Administration hopes to avert setback in Russian ties. A8