Who Is Minding the Spyhouse? : CIA: The Ames case shows the need of an overhaul at the top.

The recently released report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding the Aldrich Ames espionage case is a catalogue of horrors. The committee, which is responsible for overseeing U.S. intelligence agencies, provides a detailed and gripping account of how the CIA ignored a crescendo of evidence that it had a traitor in its midst. The agency’s harshest critics could not have imagined so damaging a sequence of events as actually occurred.

From April, 1985, to this past February, Ames spied for the Soviet Union from within the CIA. During that time he was frequently drunk on the job (and was once hospitalized for alcoholism), failed to provide required reports on his professional activities, met apparently dozens of times with Soviet “handlers,” was unproductive in carrying out his CIA assignments, was given poor ratings by his supervisors, engaged in a lavish and conspicuous lifestyle that was clearly unsupportable on his CIA salary, deposited his cash payments from the Soviets in local bank accounts in his own name, stole documents, probed colleagues for information he was not authorized to have, disregarded security regulations, showed “deception” on his routine polygraph (lie detector) test and was careless to the point of unconcern when it came to concealing his espionage activities. He was so sloppy and cavalier that he drove his KGB sponsors to distraction. Nevertheless, in the words of the committee, “Ames was never disciplined by the agency and continued to be promoted and given key assignments during the course of this almost nine years of espionage activity.”

The consequences for the CIA’s ability to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union were catastrophic, resulting, according to the committee, “in the execution of 10 Soviet sources, the imprisonment of many others, the compromise of over 100 intelligence operations against the Soviet Union, and the passing of several thousand classified documents to the KGB.” By 1986, the Soviets were “wrapping up our cases with reckless abandon,” commented one CIA officer.

How can such ineptitude and inattention possibly be explained? The committee report does not try to answer that question except to note the existence of a CIA culture “unwilling and unable” to face the possibility that one of their own had become a Soviet agent. Whatever the validity of that explanation, there is at least one other major factor at work. Ever since the paranoid witch hunts within the CIA for a nonexistent mole in the 1960s and early 1970s, counterintelligence and security have been viewed with distaste and even disdain within the agency. To be assigned to either was a career dead-end for a CIA officer. Both were used as a dumping ground for substandard employees. In the critical period of the late 1980s when Ames began his career of betrayal, the overall head of CIA security was a former intelligence analyst with no background in investigatory or security work. In short, the designated guardians of the agency’s secrets were its weakest employees. Give your least valued, potentially most disgruntled personnel responsibility for your most sensitive programs and you have a disaster waiting to happen.

The entire affair has been made far worse by the CIA senior management’s reaction to it. When the scope of the intelligence losses first became known, CIA’s leadership failed to inform the congressional oversight committees, as required by law. When Ames was finally arrested, CIA management initially attempted to downgrade his importance. When the full scope of the disaster became publicly known and the agency officials responsible had been identified, the current director, James Woolsey, responded with mild letters of reprimand to less than half of them. As the committee noted, no one “was fired, demoted, suspended or even reassigned as a result.”

All this has highlighted a crisis of purpose and direction that has confronted the intelligence community since the Berlin Wall fell. The CIA and other agencies were created to collect intelligence on and do covert battle with the Soviet Union. With the Soviet empire’s demise, what purposes do these agencies serve? Do those purposes justify the massive and expensive enterprise U.S. intelligence has become?

Woolsey had a unique opportunity to turn a fresh page in the history of American intelligence. He became director in a new Administration at a time when everyone was looking for new ideas and a new direction--and a new austerity. He had a mandate to take bold initiatives. There have been none. As for Ames, he was a blight on the record of previous directors. Woolsey was in a position to claim credit for finally bringing Ames to justice and to underline the seriousness of the matter by punishing those responsible and instituting tough reforms in counterintelligence. He has not. Finally, in these difficult times when close and effective collaboration between the intelligence agencies and the congressional oversight committees is vital, Woolsey has so mishandled the relationship as to virtually disqualify himself from continuation in office.

If the CIA is to remain an important component of national security in the late 1990s--and that is by no means certain--it will certainly require a major overhaul under new leadership.