A Wounded Image Shadows the CIA : Ames case report underlines need for rebuilding

Even congressional intelligence committee members who had a good idea of what to expect from the report assessing the damage done to the Central Intelligence Agency by Aldrich Ames were shocked by the briefing they got this week.

Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, describes the revelations of the harm done by Ames’ espionage for the Soviet Union while he was a trusted CIA employee as “just mind-boggling.” Rep. Larry Combest (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says Ames provided a “veritable library of highly classified intelligence estimates” to Moscow. CIA Director John Deutch, who was brought in by President Clinton to clean up the mess revealed by the Ames case, calls the agency’s inability to detect more than eight years of betrayal “devastating” and “inexcusable.” Deutch says a key priority now is to “rebuild confidence” in the CIA’s integrity. That’s going to take some doing.

‘TURNED’ AGENTS: It was known early in the case that at least 10 Soviet agents working for the CIA had been identified and executed because of information Ames gave Moscow. What has now been learned is that at least 100 other active or potential CIA agents in the Soviet Union were fingered by Ames and then “turned” by Soviet intelligence agencies. That means the information they provided the CIA was usually false or deceptive. When it was factual, it was because the KGB or Soviet military intelligence wanted American officials to know about certain things. Some of the misleading information reached the highest levels of the U.S. government and is said to have helped shape policy, including decisions about spending billions on various military projects. Most startling, some of the reports that were known to be planted by the KGB were passed on to high U.S. officials with no hint that the sources were tainted because they were in fact controlled by the Soviets. In retrospect, it seems a wonder the United States was able to win the Cold War.

REBUILDING EFFORT: Deutch hopes to help restore confidence in the CIA’s human intelligence sources by sharing information about those sources with the agency’s top intelligence consumers. A reasonable idea, we suppose, except that there may be nothing to stop any clever foreign counterintelligence operation that fools the CIA--as it seems to have been fooled repeatedly by turned agents in the 1980s and early ‘90s--from fooling the CIA’s consumers as well.

The preferable if harder approach is, of course, to prevent any future Aldrich Ameses from getting the chance to betray. That doesn’t mean just weeding out obvious incompetents and flagrant drunks--and Ames was both--but erasing the arrogant mind-set that not only tolerated and promoted a bungler like Ames but for years, and despite the most obvious clues, failed to detect his treachery.

If the CIA is able to convince its critics it has been able to do that, faith in its credibility will follow.