Will Americans Get the Full Story? : Ames may tell all to the CIA in spy case, but the agency isn’t likely to be as forthcoming

The plea-bargain agreement reached in the Aldrich Ames spy case should allow the Central Intelligence Agency to get the more or less full story about how one of its senior counterintelligence officers got away with betraying his country to Moscow for so many years. It should also give the CIA a much clearer fix on just what information Ames passed on to his masters, without the risk of having sensitive facts revealed in an open-court trial. That is the upside of this deal. The downside is that taking the Ames case out of the courtroom could allow the CIA to continue to shield from public view the reasons for its own staggering failure to identify and move much sooner against the traitor in its ranks.

Under the deal, Ames is to go to prison for life, with no chance of parole. His wife and, says the government, confederate in espionage will serve between 63 and 72 months behind bars. That will allow her eventually to tend to the welfare of the couple’s 5-year-old son--something they should have thought about before they got involved in espionage. In exchange for leniency Ames is to tell all to the CIA about his spying.

That’s not a bad deal except, as we say, that the full disclosure that Ames promises to make about his treachery almost certainly won’t be matched by full disclosure from the CIA about how he was able to get away with his crimes for so long. That’s something the relevant oversight committees in Congress will insist upon hearing; it’s also something all Americans have a right to know.

Ames collected $2.5 million from the Russians starting in 1985 and spent much of it extravagantly--on a fancy home paid for in cash, on expensive cars and other grown-up toys. The CIA in time learned about this spending, but then apparently without serious further checking bought Ames’ story that the money came from an inheritance. Worse, the CIA appears to have delayed after it suspected it had been penetrated, letting years pass before it began to cooperate fully with the FBI’s counterespionage investigation. Why? CIA Director R. James Woolsey let slip last week that he expected other prosecutions for spying to grow out of the Ames case. Does that hint that someone else in the CIA might have been working with or covering up for Ames?

In court this week the government called the Ames spy case the most damaging in the nation’s history. It further noted that at least four Soviet officials who were working for U.S. intelligence are known to have been betrayed by Ames and executed as a result. In time the CIA will probably learn how all this happened. What the American people will want to know is just how CIA bungling let it go on for so long.