Circle of Treason (27 page)

Ames had a few lunch or drink contacts with Divilkovskiy before the latter returned to Moscow at the end of 1984. According to the file, Ames asked Divilkovskiy if he knew a Soviet colleague who would like to meet an American businessman to exchange ideas now that Divilkovskiy was leaving. Divilkovskiy gave Ames Chuvakhin's name and Ames duly reported to the CIA and FBI that he intended to call Chuvakhin in an effort to develop a relationship. Because Chuvakhin was not a KGB or GRU officer, and nothing in his personal life seemed to offer a “hook,” the FBI did not pay particular attention to him. He was a natural object of interest to the CIA, however, because he presumably possessed information of importance to our government.

Ames, in the alias he had used with Divilkovsky and the same story about being an out-of-town businessman, first tried to set up a meeting with Chuvakhin in early 1985. Chuvakhin did not seem to be very interested in contact with Ames, but he agreed to a get-together for drinks at the Mayflower Hotel on 16 April 1985. However, Chuvakhin did not show up. According to the file, Ames went to the nearby Soviet embassy to ask Chuvakhin if there had been some mix-up. He had a short chat with Chuvakhin and then left. CIA officers were not supposed to visit the Soviet embassy for any reason without first informing the FBI, because the FBI had an observation post covering the entrance and tried to identify all unknown visitors. However, Ames did call the FBI later that day to apologize and explain that he had gone in on the spur of the moment because he was frustrated by his unsuccessful efforts to touch base with Chuvakhin.

The next contacts between Ames and Chuvakhin, duly reported by Ames, took place in May. They consisted of a meeting at the embassy for drinks on the fifteenth and a lunch on the seventeenth. Further contacts continued in June and July. Then Ames' reporting ceased, although there were indications that the relationship continued and the FBI had asked more than once for updates. One possible explanation that occurred to us was that Ames, caught up in the time-consuming and high-priority task of debriefing Yurchenko and writing up his notes for impatient consumers, plus making last-minute preparations for his wedding to Rosario, and processing for his overseas assignment to Rome all at the same time, had just not had time to file his accounts of his meetings with Chuvakhin. This was not out of line with Ames' usual practices. He had been chastised in the past for being delinquent in submitting required reporting. Yet it was an oddity worth noting. The last relevant item in Chuvakhin's file was a cable to Rome that reached there just as Ames arrived in July 1986, almost a year after the non-reported meetings had started. The cable asked once again for Ames' account of any contacts with Chuvakhin, but it was never answered.

Sandy further discovered that Ames had followed somewhat the same pattern in Rome. He had some contacts with a Soviet embassy official named Aleksey Khrenkov. These contacts were spread over the three years of Ames' tour, but the reporting was desultory and contained gaps.

Concurrent with Sandy's compilation of Ames' daily activities, Dan Payne, urged on by Paul Redmond who let his impatience boil over because he believed that we were not proceeding with sufficient speed, had started spending almost full time pulling together information on Ames' finances. Using National Security Letters, which were signed by the Director of Security and which requested the addressees to provide information on Ames without disclosing to him that this was being done, Dan contacted the banking and credit card institutions where Ames had accounts. The institutions complied with the letters and Dan soon had great masses of financial details to organize into a coherent picture. Unfortunately, as the law read at the time, brokerage houses were not mentioned. Although Dan made a determined effort, he was never able to convince Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and others to give him their records. He also never got a list of Ames' foreign dealings, although we knew that he had an Italian bank account while stationed in Rome and that during the same period he had opened an account with Credit Suisse in Switzerland. He was also believed to have bought property in Colombia.

Dan entered his collection of Ames' financial records into a computer spreadsheet. Like Sandy's endeavors, this was a tedious job because he had acquired not just monthly statements but all the supporting minutia such as canceled checks, deposit slips, and credit card slips. It soon became clear that, even though some of the puzzle pieces were missing, extremely large sums of money were passing through Ames' hands.

Dan sat behind Sandy in an adjoining cubicle. After he finished putting his data into the spreadsheet, he passed the accumulated bits of paper across the high barrier separating their desks. Sandy would then look over the collection of bank and credit card statements to decide which items warranted inclusion in her chronology. Not wanting to make her compilation more unwieldy than it already was, she decided not to input the more humdrum items such as grocery bills and other routine purchases. What she was looking for were any indications of travel or activity outside his routine, any purchases of computer equipment, and any big-ticket or unusual expenditures.

In August 1992 Sandy hit pay dirt. Dan had been logging deposits into Ames' checking account and that of his wife. As he finished with the slips, he passed them to Sandy as was their practice. When Sandy input
the deposits into her chronology, she discovered three correlations between meetings with Chuvakhin and subsequent deposits, as follows:

17 May 1985—Ames lunches with Chuvakhin

18 May 1985—Ames deposits $9,000

2 Jul 1985—Ames lunches with Chuvakhin

5 Jul 1985—Ames deposits $5,000

31 Jul 1985—Ames lunches with Chuvakhin

31 Jul 1985—Ames deposits $8,500

To Sandy this was an epiphany. She told us what she had found, then sped to Redmond to fill him in. Her excited announcement to him was: “It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell what is going on here. Rick is a goddamn Russian spy.”

As for the rest of us, it took some time for the significance of Sandy's discovery to set in. The FBI especially had another mole candidate whom they favored. However, gradually we began to understand that we had found the first link that would eventually lead to Ames' arrest and conviction. (Much later in the investigation several other deposits, suggesting further correlations, were found. Unfortunately, we did not have the full picture in the fall of 1992. We had asked the FBI to search their files for information on any contacts between Ames and Chuvakhin, and also to review the telephone tap coverage of the Soviet embassy. The first part of this tasking was accomplished but FBI headquarters balked at the review of the telephone coverage, explaining that this would be a very labor-intensive undertaking and that they could not justify it unless they opened up a formal investigation.)

Not long after Sandy's epiphany, Dan completed his financial research. Even without counting the assets for which we had been unable to obtain records, from 1985 to 1991 Ames had a total income of more than one million dollars from unidentified sources. To be precise, the figure amounted to $1,326,310.

By now 1992 was drawing to a close and so was the five-person SIU investigation. Jim Milburn began to draft a final report. This was an official FBI document and, although we had a say in the draft stages, the final wording was not under our control. The report was issued in March 1993. As we understand it, it did not pinpoint Ames as the primary suspect, but included a short list on which Ames' name appeared. It was formatted
this way because Milburn and his colleagues did not want to place FBI investigators in a box where they would have to devote all their attention to Ames without considering the other most likely “possibles.”

Professionally and personally for Jeanne and Sandy, this was one of the darkest times in the entire mole hunt. They were totally convinced that Ames was the traitor the team had spent two years looking for and that analysis proved the case. They also knew that the FBI did not share their conviction and would continue to focus on other persons on the short list. They could envisage the possibility that Ames would fall into a bureaucratic black hole and never have to face the criminal justice system. Rather, he would retire from the CIA at his convenience, and spend the rest of his life enjoying an opulent lifestyle paid for with the blood money he had earned.

Luckily, in 1993 additional information became available. This new information, while it did not identify Ames, pointed in his direction. It added to the comfort level of those who had not been convinced by the results of our analytic efforts and forced the FBI to open a full-scale investigation of Ames, as outlined in the next chapter.

THE FBI TAKES OVER

O
N
12 M
AY
1993,
THE
FBI
OPENED
a full investigation of Ames. The operation was code-named NIGHTMOVER and run out of the Washington Metropolitan Field Office, then located in a rundown section of town called Buzzard's Point. Les Wiser Jr. was chosen to be the FBI supervisory special agent in charge of the case. Wiser, a quick and imaginative thinker with a law degree and counterintelligence experience, was a good choice. Whatever may have been his feelings about the CIA, he was open with us and pragmatic enough to ask for our help when necessary to get the job done. We also had a collegial relationship with three of his top aides, Rudy Guerin, Mike Donner, and Del Spry, and of course the two Jims continued to be active in the investigation as it unfolded. On the analytic side, Danielle Lunden served as a valuable member of the team.

At the FBI headquarters level, our cool but correct contacts with Tim Caruso continued. A veteran of the FBI's unsuccessful ANLACE probe, he was assigned to head up what was called PLAYACTOR, the FBI's independent look at the 1985 compromises, which was being carried on at the same time as CIC/SIU's scouring of the same evidence. The only upside to PLAYACTOR was that we became acquainted with Mike Anderson, Caruso's deputy, who understood counterintelligence and who was a team player. When possible, we preferred to deal with him rather than with Caruso.

PLAYACTOR was more of a hindrance than a help. Its salient achievement, a monstrous wall chart, was a source of mirth and annoyance to Sandy and Jeanne. Mirth because it was a wonder to behold, and annoyance because we were constantly being asked for information to feed into it, tasking we considered a waste of valuable time because the information was often irrelevant to the problem at hand. The best description is from Peter Maas'
Killer Spy
:

The chart Tim Caruso had drawn up covered an entire wall filled with cross-indexed squares. Across the top were all the known compromises. There was a dateline for them that began in 1955. Color-coded leads were at the bottom. The different colors depicted which sources they had come from. . . . In the center of the chart, also color-coded, were not only the details of past FBI operations, but all the details of CIA operations that were kept from the FBI until Jim Holt and Jim Milburn took up residence at Langley. Looking at the chart, you saw the entire history of compromises, suspected or real, the seismic moments, where the hot spots were in both time and place.
¹

In other words, it was the well-known mixture of apples and oranges, with some cherries, bananas, and a kumquat or two thrown in for good measure.

Unlike PLAYACTOR, Wiser's NIGHTMOVER investigation moved along at a fast clip, employing all the means and techniques of a major FBI investigation. The CIA provided support to important aspects of the probe. When the FBI wanted to place a beacon in Ames' car to track his movements, Dan Payne designed a scenario to deliver the car to the FBI technicians so that they could implant the beacon under controlled and relatively safe circumstances. He suggested that Ames be invited to a counternarcotics conference at FBI headquarters along with his supervisor, Dave Edger. We then primed Edger to ask Ames to drive, knowing that Ames would acquiesce in order to please his boss. While the conference was being held, the technicians moved the car from its parking space, successfully inserted the beacon, and returned the car to its slot without anyone being the wiser.

When the FBI first placed Ames under surveillance, they did so without closely coordinating with us. This turned out to be a mistake because when the FBI surveillants wanted to follow Ames onto the CIA
compound, they approached the unwitting guards for assistance. This approach stirred up a spate of rumors that reached as far as Director of Security. In order to calm the situation, we caused a notice to be disseminated informing our security officers that the FBI and CIA were conducting some joint exercises and that once the FBI surveillance teams identified themselves they were not to be subjected to further interference.

One of the most time-consuming projects for us as well as for the FBI was the placement of cameras and phone taps in Ames' CIA premises. First, we managed via Edger to get him moved to an office suitable for the FBI's purposes. Next we facilitated the presence of the FBI's specialists. All of the entries took place at night, after most CIA personnel had gone home. We obtained the combination to the vault in which Ames' office was located, and one of us was always present when the FBI was at work, should it be necessary to deal with security guards or employees working at odd hours. Luckily it never was. In practice, on occasion many of us spent half the night in this endeavor, but had to disguise our moonlighting. This meant appearing the next morning on time and putting in a regular day's work. Don Robinson, a security officer then in charge of CIC's Counter-espionage Group, volunteered for much of this support duty.