CIA Still Reeling From Ames Ties to Soviet Agents

It was only after the KGB made a terrible mistake that the CIA caught on to its game.

The Soviet spy agency was running a string of double agents against the CIA beginning in about 1987, feeding “controlled information” to American intelligence while trying to penetrate the CIA’s clandestine espionage networks inside Moscow. At any one time, roughly half a dozen double agents--Soviets thought by the CIA to be working for the United States but in fact loyal to their own government--were enticing the Americans with secret information about advanced Soviet military hardware.

This double-agent network was so successful, and the information the agents handed over so seductive, that the Central Intelligence Agency apparently did not figure out that it was dealing with double agents for two or three years after the network was created.

It was only when a KGB officer involved in the double-agent operation committed a simple mistake that alarm bells rang at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. The officer had mistakenly put information from one double agent into a “dead-drop” message site in Moscow that the CIA had assigned to another agent--who also happened to be a double agent.

Immediately, the CIA knew that it was faced with espionage poison. “There were mistakes by the KGB that helped us,” acknowledged one U.S. intelligence source.

Complicated as the double-agent network was, it has become much more so with the arrest and conviction of Aldrich H. Ames for working as a Soviet spy while he was a high-ranking officer at CIA headquarters during that period.

Leaked details of the CIA’s classified report on the damage done by Ames have already sparked a firestorm of protest over the arrogance of the CIA’s permanent bureaucracy and raised fresh questions about the role the spy agency should play in the post-Cold War world.

Behind-Scenes Debate

As early as this week, the CIA is expected to make public a declassified version of its report.

Yet a debate is still raging behind the scenes among U.S. intelligence officials over whether the CIA has really gotten to the bottom of a case that involved such massive betrayal and so much potential for deception and misinterpretation. Broad disagreements persist over fundamental questions about the controversy.

Chief among them: Just how close a link was there between Ames and the KGB’s double agents?

After the CIA stumbled upon evidence of Soviet double agents, a reliable source inside Soviet intelligence confirmed to the agency that there was an entire network of double agents being orchestrated by the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB, which handled counterintelligence.

Yet the CIA decided to continue to pass along information from the double agents to U.S. policy-makers, without warning them that the information might be tainted. That, in turn, set the stage for this fall’s spy scandal: Seven current or former CIA officials have been reprimanded, while three former CIA directors have been cited by the CIA’s inspector general for their failure to take firm control of the agency’s bureaucracy and prevent the distribution of tainted intelligence from double agents.

Contrary to public perception of the case, the CIA’s secret Ames damage assessment has found that not all the KGB’s double agents were originally CIA informants who were betrayed by Ames and then forced by the KGB to become double agents.

Instead, this double-agent network was at least partly a creation of the KGB.

In addition to some CIA informants who were betrayed by Ames and then turned into double agents, the damage report has found that the KGB set up its own operatives as new double agents at the same time. To convince the Americans that these agents were genuine spies, it supplied them with credible information to turn over to the CIA.

‘Orgy of Bloodshed’

Nevertheless, some high-level veterans of the CIA’s Soviet operations are convinced that the entire double-agent network was a KGB fabrication--and that the Soviets never turned any CIA informants into double agents.

The Soviets, they insist, killed or arrested all CIA informants who were betrayed by Ames.

“Ames gave them 10 of our people in 1985, and they killed them, click, click, click, one after another,” said a former senior CIA official. “We were out of business in Moscow. There was an orgy of bloodshed, and we didn’t know why.

“But after that, we changed our procedures, tightened up access and started to rebuild with new recruits,” the former official added. “And eventually, we were getting stuff that I know the KGB would never have allowed to be passed to us. I’m convinced that Ames didn’t have access--and didn’t penetrate that new network.”

So, as it tries to sift fact from fiction, the CIA finds itself falling back into a looking-glass world of agents and double agents, a process that breeds dark suspicions and leads into an arena where the answers are never obvious.

One thing seems clear to intelligence experts--Director of Central Intelligence John M. Deutch was wrong when he claimed during an Oct. 31 news conference that the agency can now close the book on the Ames case. Not all the questions about Ames’ espionage have been answered.

“It’s the ultimate case of epistemology. We have to ask ourselves: ‘Do we know what we think we know?’ ” said one intelligence source.

Indeed, there may never be a full accounting of all of the ripple effects from the damage done by Ames, a Soviet mole who operated within the CIA’s inner sanctum for nine years.

Sources say, for instance, that the CIA’s damage assessment has found that Ames compromised about 300 to 400 cases around the world, and as many as 900 “operations”--individual acts of espionage, which could be something as routine as one meeting with a spy. Is it really possible to know, CIA experts ask, precisely what impact Ames’ espionage had in every case? What’s more, Ames served for a time on a promotion panel reviewing the sensitive personnel files of other CIA officers. Should those officers all be considered betrayed and compromised?

“Goddammit!” snapped Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), deeply frustrated that more information about the case has not been made public and that questions still remain. “At this juncture, I don’t think anybody knows what decisions were made at the Pentagon [based] on the information from these double agents, or whether the information was really faulty.”

“It’s been how long since Ames was caught?” Specter asked. “And we still don’t really have the full impact of Ames!”

Indirect Role

Ames’ impact is at its murkiest when it comes to the role he played in the creation of the KGB double-agent network.

At the least, by revealing to the Soviets how badly their own operations had been penetrated by the CIA, Ames played an indirect part in prompting the KGB to set up the new double agents.

Soon after he first approached the KGB in 1985, Ames gave the Soviets the identities of 10 Soviet intelligence officers who were working for the CIA and the FBI.

Ames’ revelations struck like a body blow to the proud KGB, which had had no idea that the CIA had so thoroughly infiltrated its ranks.

After arresting and executing those agents, the KGB realized that it had to find out more about American espionage networks.

Double agents had been part of the counterintelligence game throughout the Cold War, but sources say the Ames case marked a turning point for the KGB in its use of double agents.

Before Ames, U.S. intelligence sources say, the KGB had often been reluctant to provide its double agents with high-quality “feed”--genuine secret information--to make them appear credible to the other side. Yet after learning from Ames how much an advantage the CIA had, the KGB became convinced that it had to provide its double agents with better information to lure the CIA into taking the bait.

For the most part, the information from the double agents covered highly technical military matters and included Soviet documents that could be verified and cross-checked by U.S. military experts.

Even after the discovery that the data was coming from double agents, CIA and Pentagon analysts continued to use the documents to make estimates about trends in Soviet military planning. If, for example, the KGB allowed a double agent to turn over accurate technical specifications for advanced components on a new submarine, that might mean that the Soviets had stopped work on that project for lack of resources and had decided to try to fool the United States into thinking that the project was further along than it really was.

The CIA’s rules allowed such reports from known Soviet double agents to be distributed to analysts and other policy-makers--as long as the materials included warnings about their sources. Without such disclosures, however, the information could be dangerously confusing to Pentagon analysts.

Yet the secret information from the Soviet double agents proved to be so alluring that those rules were ignored by a handful of CIA bureaucrats, who took advantage of a lack of outside checks and balances on their behavior.

Source of Power

Enter Robert Lubbehusen, the longtime chief of the reports section within the CIA’s Soviet Division, and the man who sources say is at the heart of the controversy over the double agents. The source of Lubbehusen’s unusual power was the highly secretive structure of the Soviet Division inside the CIA’s clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Until he was forced out of his post at the end of 1991, Lubbehusen was an obscure middle-manager, a widely disliked CIA lifer who through dint of longevity had come to play a critical role in the intelligence system. He was the CIA’s gatekeeper for all reports flowing from the agency’s spies inside the Soviet Union. He thus had the power to determine how the sources of the information would be described in his reports.

“He was a character right out of Kafka, a guy who was enmeshed in the bureaucracy,” recalled one CIA source.

CIA case officers in Moscow had virtually no direct contact with the Russian spies they worked with, and did not even read the intelligence materials the spies left for them in dead drops. Instead, the materials were shipped directly to the Soviet Division’s reports section at CIA headquarters for processing.

There, Lubbehusen and the reports officers who worked for him would be the first to see it.

The reports officer processing the “substantive” information--the intelligence gathered by the spy--often would not see the “operational” information--the identity of the spy and messages from the spy about meetings and contacts. That meant Lubbehusen was often the only one in the reports section to see the big picture--both the identity of the spy and the intelligence provided by the spy.

So Lubbehusen was free to describe the sources of the information however he chose--and no one else in the reports section or in the CIA’s Moscow station knew enough about the intelligence to contradict him. His boss--the chief of the Soviet Division--saw his reports, but usually only rubber-stamped them.

Sources say Lubbehusen, who has retired from the agency but was still reprimanded by Deutch for his actions, came to believe that the information the double agents were providing was not only genuine but so valuable that disclosing that it came from double agents would only distract policy-makers from the quality of the intelligence.

So Lubbehusen dropped the disclosures on the reports, a practice that continued after he was removed from his post. Other Soviet Division managers received reprimands for continuing his policies.

Constant Demands

Yet sources say Lubbehusen may have dropped the disclosures because of pressure from the Defense Department that the CIA turn over as much intelligence about the Soviet military as possible, whether it came from double agents or not.

One Soviet Division reports-section source said there were constant demands from the Defense Department’s research-and-development and weapons-procurement staffs to turn over raw Soviet military intelligence as quickly as possible.

“When we would get technical military information, you would have to talk to the Air Force or Army and tell them what intelligence you had, because this was really arcane stuff that we didn’t understand,” the officer said.

“So the military people would know what we had even before we had released it to policy-makers--and they would always say: ‘Put that stuff out.’ If we said: ‘We’re not sure about the source,’ they would say they wanted it anyway. And if we held it back, they might complain that we were suppressing intelligence. And at the same time, we were constantly told by CIA management to be responsive to [Defense Department] needs.”

Now the CIA’s damage assessment has found that the “controlled information” from Soviet double agents may have “influenced” weapons development at the Defense Department, which has begun a review of the matter.

So far, the Pentagon says it has not turned up any weapons programs where the tainted intelligence played a significant role.