The Ames CIA Spy Case: Unstacking Russian Dolls

The CIA spy case that exploded here and across the world last week resembles nothing so much as a matryoshka , one of those Russian stacking dolls that open to reveal another inside, and so on, until the last one is reached. But in this instance, the last, smallest doll may never be found.

For the case of Aldrich Hazen (Rick) Ames, and his Colombian-born wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Ames, arrested by the FBI on charges that they were Russian spies, is so rich in mysteries, puzzles, riddles and contradictions that the answers may never be untangled even as the CIA’s counterintelligence experts begin their long, and sure to be difficult “damage assessment,” a process already under way.

On the surface, the facts seem simple enough. If the charges are true, Ames, who has worked for Central Intelligence for 31 years, and his wife, once a CIA asset in Mexico City, were paid more than $1.5 million by the KGB and its successor, the SVR, over a nine-year period to spy for Moscow.

But then the puzzles begin. How and when did U.S. counterintelligence discover the alleged traitors? The answer to this question, at least, is known within the CIA and the FBI, but the information filtering out of those agencies is fuzzy.

Part of the answer goes back to a former KGB official, Vitaly Yurchenko, who defected to the CIA in August, 1985, only to redefect three months later, apparently disgruntled with his CIA handlers and disappointed that he was unable to rekindle a love affair with the wife of a Soviet diplomat. Yurchenko provided information that led the FBI to Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA officer who sold the secrets of the CIA’s Moscow station to the KGB. Howard then escaped an FBI dragnet and vanished into the New Mexico desert, only to turn up a year later in Moscow, where he still lives under the protection of the SVR.

But Robert M. Gates, the former director of the CIA, says that in the mid-1980s, “there were some problems that couldn’t be blamed on Howard.” The problems were that the CIA was losing agents inside Russia who had been recruited after Howard had escaped. Some were arrested and some--but not all--presumably executed, although the CIA won’t talk about that. Gates said an investigation then began that eventually zeroed in on the Ames couple.

But Ames, it is known, was one of Yurchenko’s CIA debriefers in 1985. If the FBI’s charges are correct, Ames had already started spying for the KGB three months before Yurchenko defected. And Yurchenko was the man in charge of North American operations for the KGB. He should have known of a major new recruitment inside the CIA, a tremendous coup for the Russians. Why did Yurchenko not tell the CIA that one of the men debriefing him was a Soviet spy?

Apparently he did not, because former FBI director William S. Sessions says he was informed of the investigation into the Ameses some two years ago, which suggests that the FBI and the CIA were not focusing on Ames and his wife until about 1991 or 1992--seven years after Yurchenko left town.

Although some speculate that Yurchenko was sent here to reveal Howard and ex-National Security Agency officer Ronald W. Pelton, who is serving life in prison, and thereby divert attention from a more important spy, U.S. counterintelligence agents doubt that. Most believe Yurchenko a true defector who changed his mind and went home.

Open another doll. Last year, the Washington Post revealed that the FBI had recruited two KGB agents inside the Soviet Embassy in Washington, Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin. Martynov, in fact, was the KGB officer assigned to escort Yurchenko back to Moscow in November, 1985. Martynov was then arrested, as was Motorin, who was sent back to Moscow around the same time; both were reportedly executed.

Intelligence officials whisper that the pair were betrayed by Ames. But if Ames was already a KGB spy, as the FBI claims, why didn’t the two KGB men inside the Soviet Embassy beat Ames to the punch and betray him first? Ask John Le Carre.

Move on and open another doll. Why didn’t the CIA or the FBI catch on to the Ameses sooner, considering their high-living style? For example, the couple paid cash--$540,000--for a home in Northern Virginia, bought a farm and two condos in Colombia, and spent $5,000 a month on credit cards. One answer, according to intelligence officials, is that Ames spread the word to friends and neighbors that his wife’s family was wealthy.

Then there is the puzzle of the polygraphs. Ames passed two lie-detector tests at CIA, an agency that continues to have touching faith in the device, although it is often unreliable and there are various ways to defeat it. (Taking 400 milligrams of meprobamate will do the trick nicely, studies show.) Under present policies, the CIA gives lie-detector tests to new employees, again in three years, and after that, every five years.

Moreover, within the CIA, sensitive employees like Ames, who was chief of the counterintelligence branch of the Soviet division, are not screened more frequently than anybody else.

If we open yet another doll, we come to the peculiar fact that, in 1984, Ames was assigned by the CIA to approach and try to recruit officials of the Soviet Embassy in Washington. He was supposed to report these meetings to the CIA, but the FBI says he did not report some of them. Instead of recruiting Russians, the government charges, he began taking money from them, starting in May, 1985. But Gates told me that it would be very unusual for a CIA officer to approach a Soviet official in Washington to try to recruit him. “That’s the job of the FBI,” he said. The CIA is barred by law from conducting operations inside the United States. Did it violate its charter? Other CIA sources say that Ames’ assignment was, if unusual, not without precedent.

Then there is the mystery, contained in the FBI’s affidavit in the case, of the 1986 meeting with the Soviets. According to the FBI, “FBI records” show that Ames scheduled a meeting with a Soviet around Feb. 14 of that year but never reported the meeting to the CIA. If U.S. counterintelligence did not investigate Ames until around 1992, how could the FBI have records of the 1986 planned meeting?

It sounds as though the FBI may have checked its wiretaps of the Soviet Embassy and discovered that Ames telephoned the embassy to arrange a meeting. If he did not use his real name, did the FBI match his voice print to the tape? That technique was used to identify Pelton.

Finally, there is the puzzle of how many, if any, CIA agents were executed on the basis of information that Ames may have provided to the KGB. Some reports say as many as 10 were executed, but is the number accurate, and can they be tied to Ames? As a counterintelligence officer in the Soviet division, Ames, if the charges are true, would have been in a position to destroy the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union, and after 1991, Russia. The FBI says that he revealed the identities of CIA officers, and of CIA “human assets,” presumably a reference to the CIA’s Moscow station and to Russians secretly spying for the agency. If Russian intelligence knew all about the CIA’s operations in Moscow, then the KGB and the SVR were like puppet masters pulling the strings. If it’s all true, the CIA officers were marionettes dancing to Moscow’s tune. In effect, the KGB/SVR controlled the CIA.

Despite the professed shock in Washington that the Russians continue to spy on the United States, most political leaders understand that espionage did not end with the end of the Cold War. It is a point made by another former CIA director, William E. Colby. “Before we get too morally indignant,” Colby says, “let’s realize the Russians were said to be using Mr. Ames to identify American spies in Russia. That meant we had those spies.”

Professional spies, as Colby was, know that the game goes on. They are dismayed, although not shocked by the week’s developments. But even veteran CIA officers do not pretend to know the answers to the many mysteries and the tangled maze that is the Ames case. Only a CIA optimist would think that the Ames matryoshka will yield up all its secrets.