FBI Snatched Trash Can to Lift the Lid on CIA Mole : Espionage: Officials reveal that unauthorized operation helped trap convicted turncoat Aldrich Ames.

A mole was burrowing through the CIA’s ranks--that much had finally become clear from the alarming number of U.S. agents being killed by the Soviets and the number of U.S. intelligence operations being thwarted.

But who was it?

The effort to find out became part “Dragnet,” part Keystone Kops--a combination of brilliance and blunders that ultimately led to the arrest of CIA officer Aldrich H. Ames, the most damaging spy in the agency’s history.

Although Ames’ espionage is well documented, the FBI has not previously revealed details of its pursuit of the spy. But recently it decided that it would permit interviews with bureau investigators and other officials in response to criticism of its role in the case.

It was September, 1993, and the FBI’s little-known but highly regarded Special Surveillance Group had failed to follow Ames as he made a quick early-morning trip across the Potomac River into the District of Columbia and then back to his suburban Virginia home.

That same afternoon, the surveillance group did not keep up with him as he roared out of CIA headquarters in his car and headed for what the FBI suspected was contact with his Soviet handler.

Alarmed and convinced that Ames had communicated with the Russians, Leslie G. Wiser Jr., the FBI supervisor on the case, proposed unleashing the surveillance group to comb through Ames’ household trash for evidence of spying.

Robert (Bear) Bryant, then in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, turned down the request, fearing that Ames--trained in counterintelligence--would detect the risky operation. Nevertheless, late one night the Special Surveillance Group, operating from a van with a special noise-supressed engine, snatched Ames’ trash can and replaced it within seconds with a duplicate receptacle.

In the container, the FBI team found a torn draft of a note revealing that Ames was seeking a meeting in Bogota, Colombia, with his Russian spymasters. “That iced it for us,” Bryant said. “That’s just gold.”

Bryant, now assistant FBI director for national security, hailed the trash search in a recent interview as “the finest piece of insubordination I’ve ever seen. That’s why Les is a star.”

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Wiser, mindful of his career, doesn’t recall the maneuver as a case of ignoring orders. Rather, he contended, he did not ask Bryant for an OK in advance on that particular trash search.

Beyond providing proof about Ames’ activities, the note revealed information about Russian intelligence “tradecraft,” which showed that the Russians relied on old techniques of “signal sites” and “dead drop sites.” Espionage operatives use a prearranged signal site to secretly communicate--without direct contact--that something has been left for retrieval at a separate dead drop location.

The trash search was just one chapter of a tale of electronic eavesdropping, of surreptitious searches of Ames’ home in pitch-black darkness, of secret trips tailing him to Miami and Bogota, of steps to block him from taking CIA trips overseas and, finally, of subtle psychological pressures to persuade Ames to talk once he was caught.

The FBI took the unusual step of discussing the investigation, permitting interviews of officials and agents involved, after the agency was criticized by members of the House Intelligence Committee. The lawmakers said they thought that the FBI had been overly passive in the early stages of the case.

Their complaints were mild compared to the scathing criticism heaped on the CIA for being lax in monitoring Ames throughout his career in intelligence, ignoring such warning signs as Ames’ cash purchase of a $540,000 Virginia house and his ownership of a Jaguar automobile.

Besides responding to criticism, the FBI decision to discuss the case also permits the bureau to reveal details of an investigation of which it is proud and to give the public some notion of what counterintelligence work involves.

In addition to Bryant and Wiser, those interviewed included John Lewis, now Bryant’s deputy, who oversaw Russian counterintelligence at the Washington field office; Ronald T. (Rudy) Guerin, the agent who took part in the search of Ames’ house; Tim Caruso, now assistant special agent in charge of Russian intelligence in New York, and James A. Holt, now a retired FBI contract employee. Both Caruso and Holt served on an FBI analytical team that tried to determine the reason the bureau lost two key Russian agents it had recruited.

The FBI role in the investigation dates back to 1986 when the bureau learned that two Soviet intelligence operatives it had recruited in Washington as double agents, Valery F. Martinov and Sergey M. Motorin, had been arrested in the Soviet Union and were about to be executed.

Caruso, Holt and four other FBI counterintelligence specialists were assigned to a task force known as “Anlace,” a term for a medieval dagger. The task force worked in a windowless bureau room known unaffectionately as the “vault.”

In a report not completed for another year, the Anlace group weighed whether sloppy “tradecraft” by the FBI or CIA was at fault, whether there had been an electronic or other technical penetration of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, or, worst of all, a human penetration. But the group came up with no solid conclusion. At the same time, a special CIA task force was working to resolve much more sweeping losses of operations and agents that it had suffered in 1985-86.

The efforts were hampered by “very distracting background noise,” Bryant said. That included the defection to the Soviet Union of former CIA agent Edward Lee Howard, who had considerable information on the agency’s Moscow operations, and the allegation, later recanted, that a Marine security guard named Clayton J. Lonetree had let the KGB into the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

The Soviet KGB added to the confusion by circulating misinformation. It attributed the failed operations and casualties of agents to information from Howard and to sloppy work. And it falsely maintained that some of the apprehended agents were alive and well.

The FBI investigation and Ames’ subsequent confession later would establish that Ames had identified more than 10 high-level CIA and FBI sources to his Soviet handler on June 13, 1985--the largest amount of sensitive documents and critical information ever known to have been passed to the KGB in one meeting, according to the CIA.

He continued to pass critical information to the Soviets while assigned to Rome from 1986 to 1989 and after his return to Washington.

Finally, in 1991 a joint FBI-CIA team began to study the still unresolved 1985-86 intelligence compromises and identified 198 CIA employees who had access to the cases, with 29 of them tagged for priority. Ames was on the list. In fact, Lewis recalled, he was at the top of the list. But at that point it may have been his alphabetical status that placed him there.

“The first big break,” Wiser said, came in early fall of 1992 when investigators established a correlation between bank deposits that Ames had been making and his meetings with Sergey D. Chuvakhin, an official with the Soviet Embassy in Washington who Ames was supposedly assessing for possible recruitment.

“We found the deposits totally matched the meetings,” Guerin said.

Then came the fruitful trash search, which Lewis recalls as particularly challenging because Ames had “a lot of nosy neighbors” and there was a Neigborhood Watch group to spot suspicious activity.

Thus before the trash search and the dark-of-the-night house search, the Special Surveillance Group studied the routine of Ames and his wife, Rosario, along with that of the neighbors. What time did they put out their lights? Did they tend to get up during the night?

Painstaking preparation also went into the separate arrests of the couple on Feb. 21, 1994.

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As Ames drove from his house, a car with FBI agents pulled behind him, red lights blazing. Ames headed for the curb as other bureau cars blocked the street. Guerin, designated to question Ames, stood off to the side while an agent removed a cigarette from Ames’ mouth and others handcuffed him.

On the way to the FBI’s office in Tyson’s Corner, Va., Guerin sat beside Ames and saw that he appeared pale. Guerin said he thought: “I hope he doesn’t vomit on me.” But Guerin proceeded with the plan, repeating that Ames was under arrest for espionage, as the FBI radio reported that Rosario also was under arrest and their residence was “secured.”

“I said: ‘You had to know this day would come. Think about cooperating,’ ” Guerin recalled.

“Think, think, think,” Ames told himself out loud.

At the FBI office, Ames was first taken to a room specially prepared for him. On the walls were surveillance photos of him in Bogota and a picture of a Washington mailbox that he and his Russian handlers had used as a signal site. Strewn around were empty pizza boxes and half-filled coffee cups, signs that agents had been working there around the clock.

Despite the preparation, Ames refused to answer any questions.

“All my years with the agency, I’ve found the FBI does a thorough job,” he said. “It appears you have done so. I don’t see how it (answering questions) would help me.”

Times staff writer Robert L. Jackson contributed to this story.