Advertisement

Ames Says Lax CIA System Eased His Access to Secrets

Share
TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Turncoat CIA agent Aldrich H. Ames said Thursday that it was “really easy” to get the top-secret information from the agency that he sold to the Russians in the most damaging espionage case in U.S. history.

“Nobody suspected what I was doing . . . and nobody protected me,” Ames insisted in his first face-to-face interview since he pleaded guilty last month. “I never got anything I didn’t have a real good reason to get. I never had to exert myself.”

Ames, 52, said that part of the reason he was able to traffic in classified data--even after he was transferred out of the CIA’s Soviet-East European division--was a gradual breakdown of the highly vaunted “compartmentation” rule.

Advertisement

CIA officers are supposed to work in “compartments,” limited to secret material only in their field of interest. But he indicated that the system is lax at best. He said that the advent of computers and databases and the growth of a CIA bureaucracy in which “everybody has to coordinate with everything,” has left much of the old need-to-know rule outmoded.

Ames said that he “had access to a lot of things of high interest to the KGB” as chief of Soviet counterintelligence in his division in 1985--the year he began selling secrets over an eight-year period in return for $2.5 million.

He said that he continued to obtain additional sensitive data even after his transfer to anti-narcotics work in the early 1990s. But Ames said he could not disclose details of what he gave the Russians, citing ground rules for The Times interview established by government officials and his attorney, Plato Cacheris, who sat in on the hourlong session.

Ames, dressed in loose-fitting khaki prison overalls, appeared affable and relaxed, speaking in a rich baritone voice and displaying a broad, occasionally sardonic sense of humor. His full head of dark hair was combed straight back and he wore a gray mustache that looked a bit shaggy.

He sat at a round wooden table in a small, windowless room at the Alexandria jail. He talked of his spying with great detachment, as if clinically examining the actions of a third person. Little in his manner suggested that he might be capable of such an enormous crime.

Ames noted that the closed-door government debriefings are zeroing in on “the kind of things I had access to.” The interrogation sessions three days a week are conducted by a team of FBI, CIA and other intelligence community officials who are trying to learn precisely what U.S. operations or projects Ames has compromised.

Advertisement

The interrogations “are going quite well--they’re almost collegial,” Ames said.

He confessed that he often has trouble recalling exactly what he gave his Soviet and later Russian handlers but government officials jog his memory by showing him records of his CIA career, including periods when he traveled overseas and met his foreign contacts.

He is “working hard to put all the pieces together” to uphold his plea agreement to cooperate with government officials, Ames said. Under that agreement, Ames received a sentence of life in prison without chance of parole and pledged complete cooperation and truthfulness in exchange for a government recommendation of leniency for his wife, Rosario, when she is sentenced in late August.

Mrs. Ames, 41, whose role was described by the government as considerably smaller than her husband’s, is expected to receive a sentence of about five years. She pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of “aiding, advising and encouraging” her husband’s activities.

“I’m quite happy that they seem satisfied with what I’m telling them,” Ames said. “They basically held my wife hostage on this issue--quite unfairly, I thought--but I never felt my cooperation would be anything but full.”

He added with a wry smile that so far none of his questioners have asked him to take a polygraph test. Ames managed to pass a CIA-administered test in the early 1990s when he was questioned about the source of his newfound wealth.

Although smoking is prohibited in the jail, Ames said that the debriefing sessions enable him to indulge in his chain-smoking habit with cigarettes provided by his interrogators.

Advertisement

The downside of the interrogations, Ames said, “is constantly being reminded of how totally sloppy and even reckless I was” in carrying out his espionage, leaving more than 100 classified documents at his suburban Virginia home, including highly incriminating material on his home computer.

Critics also have claimed that Ames and his wife were exceedingly reckless in paying cash for a new $540,000 home and acquiring a Jaguar, which he drove to work. Ames said that he still has trouble explaining his carelessness. In part, he said, it may have reflected fatalism.

“I always felt that if suspicion ever centered on me and an actual investigation by the bureau (FBI) were to start, nothing would be proof against that,” he said.

“No matter what I did, no matter how careful I was, no matter how assiduously I destroyed and concealed everything, it would still yield to what they would be able to prove.”

His voice cracking, he seemed to exhibit remorse only when speaking of his wife and his 5-year-old son Paul.

“I mean, why did I even tell Rosario in ‘92? The answer was she really seriously suspected me and the best way out seemed to be to confirm it. But you know, if I hadn’t done that, she wouldn’t be here today.”

Advertisement

Mrs. Ames is being held separately with women prisoners in Alexandria. The two see each other only once or twice a week during joint sessions with their lawyers “and we can’t touch,” Ames said.

Asked about his thoughts for the future, Ames said that he clings to hope of being set free before his life is over--despite his sentence of life without possibility of parole. “Things could always change,” he said, rubbing his palms together rapidly. Then, as his eyes began to water, he added: “Those thoughts revolve largely around my son.”

As a CIA counterintelligence specialist on the Soviet Union, Ames took part in debriefing KGB Col. Vitaly Yurchenko, who defected in 1985 only to bolt back to Moscow three months later, raising grave doubts that his defection was authentic.

Ames said he is convinced that Yurchenko was a “totally genuine” defector. “I never had any doubts then and haven’t since.”

Although he already was working for the Soviets when Yurchenko came to the United States, Ames said he did not have any particular qualms about being unmasked by Yurchenko as a Soviet mole. Yurchenko’s job “was not such that he would have known about me,” Ames said. Ames dismissed suggestions that Yurchenko had never stopped being a Soviet agent and had, in fact, been sent here to check on Ames.

“You have to understand there are some real zealots and merchants of fabrication running around in this counterintelligence business,” Ames said. “The danger of being handed a line of total muck or totally fabricated stuff is very high.”

Advertisement

Ames said he has mixed feelings about appearing before the House and Senate Intelligence committees, both of which have asked for his testimony. He said he is eager to present Congress with his critique of CIA operations but suspects that members of Congress would not give him “an easy ride.”

Advertisement