Inside the CIA (46 page)

But the CIA occupies a fragile place in American society. Its role is difficult to define and even more difficult to carry out. The secrecy that envelops it conflicts with inherent American values and leads to mistrust. Too many times in the past, that mistrust has been warranted. And the CIA is often guilty of arrogance.

No longer should Americans “to a degree take it on faith,” as Richard Helms proposed to a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1971, “that we, too, are honorable men, devoted to her [the nation’s] service.”

While the laws and executive orders in place are sufficient, the CIA’s power can easily be misused by unscrupulous directors or presidents. This happened when President Johnson ordered the CIA to investigate the movement against the Vietnam War. It happened when President Nixon tried to get the CIA to cover up the involvement of the White House in the Watergate break-in. More recently, it happened when William Casey set a tone that led to the involvement of a handful of agency employees in the Iran-contra affair.

The surest safeguard against such aberrations again subverting the CIA’s integrity is an institutional attitude that accepts both congressional oversight and scrutiny by the press. Not too long ago, the CIA met even the most devastating charges, from accusations of drug running to murder, with a
stoic “no comment.” This suggested that the CIA does not have to answer for its actions. All too often, that attitude translated into unlawful or simply stupid activities. It was an attitude that failed to take account of the fact that the CIA can explain itself without giving away all its secrets.

It is not enough for the press and Congress to be vigilant. The agency itself must recognize and understand the value of such examination. For only through responsiveness to Congress and the media will the CIA be accountable to the American people.

With the Cold War over, the CIA was an agency in search of a mission. Not that its role did not remain critical. It would be naive to think there would be no more Saddam Husseins or Russian coups. Nor would anyone want to rule out the possibility that rogue countries or terrorists might try to threaten the U.S. with nuclear weapons. Just as much as the U.S. needs an FBI, the country needs a CIA to warn of such threats. But given the fact that the primary threat—the Soviet Union—was gone, the CIA remained vastly overstaffed. This was despite budget cuts of up to 10 percent mandated by the House and Senate intelligence committees.

In a desperate attempt to justify its remaining budget, the CIA tried to emphasize its role in fighting narcotics and terrorism. But law enforcement agencies by and large were not impressed with the agency’s intelligence on drug trafficking. CIA officers still felt uncomfortable in this arena. Nor was the threat of terrorism enough to justify the existence of an entire agency. Largely to feed their own egos, CIA officials still demanded large staffs, which often had little to do. In particular, the CIA’s princes, whose reward for a distinguished career was assignment as station chief in London, Geneva, or Paris, insisted on retaining hundreds of
officers beyond what they needed. By virtue of their political clout within the agency, the princes got what they wanted.

Against this background, the sensational arrests of Aldrich H. Ames and his wife, Maria, in February 1994 came as a reminder not only of why the CIA was still needed but also of how much remains to be done to make it a more disciplined, focused, and effective agency. A spy novelist could not have dreamed up more perfect positions for a mole within the CIA. The heavy-smoking, heavy-drinking fifty-two-year-old officer had worked for the CIA since 1962. By 1983, he had been named chief of the counterintelligence branch in the Soviet/East European Division within the Directorate of Operations. In 1985, Ames began working with the joint FBI-CIA squad within the FBI. Called Courtship, this squad tries to recruit KGB officers to work for the U.S. More recently, Ames had been assigned to the CIA’s Counternarcotics Center, with responsibility for the Balkan area.

When he was assigned to Mexico City in 1982, Ames met Maria del Rosario Casas, a Colombian cultural attaché, and recruited her to work as an agent for the CIA. They began an affair that led to Ames’s divorce from his wife and his marriage in 1985 to his former agent.

Because Ames’s job in counterintelligence required him to review files and ask questions not only at the CIA but at the FBI and other sensitive agencies, he was in an even better position to help the Russians than was the director of Central Intelligence. If the DCI began asking for a lot of sensitive case files, other employees might become suspicious. But that was part of Ames’s job.

The $2.5 million Ames was charged with receiving from the Russians beginning in 1985 signified the value of the information he was accused of passing. For the KGB is careful about how it spends its money. Never before in U.S. history had any known spy received anywhere near that sum. The closest figure was the $1 million received by Navy warrant officer John A. Walker, Jr., who collected the money over an eighteen-year period. By comparison, Ames received at least $2.5 million in just over eight years.

As a result of information Ames was believed to have
passed, the FBI said at least ten Soviet and later Russian agents working for the CIA or FBI had been executed. They included the two spies that Courtship and the FBI recruited within the Soviet embassy in Washington. Other sources said the number of spies compromised by Ames could be far higher. Indeed, the Ames case was the most damaging spy case in U.S. history.

Ames was caught by the joint FBI-CIA squad only because a defector who had had access to KGB files began working for the FBI in 1992. The defector provided the FBI with hundreds of leads on potential spy cases within the CIA and other agencies.
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While the defector did not know Ames’s name, he had enough information to allow the FBI to focus on Ames by May 1993.

Besides signaling that the Russians were not ready to be considered close allies, the case shined a devastating spotlight on the CIA’s security—or lack of it. After Ames’s arrest, a cavalcade of former CIA officials began appearing on television to say there was nothing really surprising about the case: Spying will continue regardless of whether the Cold War is over, and there is not much that can be done about it. This roll-over attitude was symptomatic of why the CIA got taken so badly and why so many other spies had previously penetrated the agency’s supposedly airtight security.

While it is true that spying, like bank robberies, will always continue, it is not true that nothing can be done about it. The fact that a spy has succeeded is not sufficient reason to blame an agency, any more than it would be fair to blame the FBI when a bank is held up. Yet in virtually every penetration of the CIA, there had been warning signs that should have tipped off the CIA to a possible security breach, and in virtually every case when the CIA’s Office of Security got involved, it botched the job.

The Ames case was a classic example. Ames was known to be a heavy drinker, a borderline alcoholic. He violated
agency rules by having an affair with an agent working for him in Mexico City, the woman he later married and who would be arrested with him. In 1984, Ames again violated agency rules by sleeping with her in a New York CIA safehouse, a sanctuary for the most sensitive meetings with agents working for the CIA.

After divorcing that year and remarrying in 1985, Ames complained to coworkers about his lack of money, a result of his divorce agreement. Then, in 1989, he bought a home at 2512 North Randolph Street in Arlington, Virginia, for $540,000 in cash. He spent another $99,000 on improvements. In 1992, he began driving to work in a Jaguar he had purchased for $25,000. His total credit card charges beginning in 1985 were $455,000.

After being transferred to the CIA’s Counternarcotics Center, Ames continued to spend much of his time in the CIA’s Soviet Division. By schmoozing with former colleagues, Ames was able to cull as much information as he had before. Ames also tried to obtain identities of covert agents whose real names were stored in CIA computers. Access was initially denied, but no one tried to find out who had been trying to pry loose information to which they were not entitled. Ames later was able to break into the database.

With all these red flags waving, Ames should have been transferred to a less-sensitive position, if not fired. Yet nothing was done—no discipline was meted out for violating agency rules, no investigators were called in to probe Ames’s activities or find out how he could live so well on an annual salary of $69,843.

Looking back at previous CIA penetrations, the same pattern emerged. The CIA knew Edward Lee Howard had a drug problem but prepared to send him anyway to Moscow, where he began working for the Soviets. The agency knew that William P. Kampiles also had a drug problem but allowed him access to the top-secret manual for the KH-11 spy satellite, which he promptly sold to the Soviets. The agency knew that CIA officer David H. Barnett had left the agency, but when he reapplied, it failed to give him a new polygraph test. It turned out he had told the Soviets about
CIA operations in Indonesia. The CIA knew that Sharon Scranage, a CIA support employee in Ghana, had been having an affair with a cousin of the Ghanaian prime minister—a violation of agency rules. But the CIA did not discipline her and left her in place. She then gave her boyfriend information about virtually all the CIA’s operations in Ghana.

In the case of Karl F. Koecher, the Czech Intelligence Service officer who became a CIA employee, investigators realized later that the Office of Security had overlooked his failure on a polygraph test. Thus his application should have been rejected. Yet when spies from the other side were willing to help the CIA, as when top KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko defected to the U.S., the Office of Security treated them as prisoners, leading—in Yurchenko’s case—to his redefection. It was also significant that the defector who started the FBI on Ames’s trail had chosen to work with the FBI, not the CIA.

If the Office of Security consisted of Keystone Kops, it was symptomatic of the larger agency culture, which abhors security. Some have speculated that the attitude is a reaction to the fear generated by James J. Angleton, the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief who never did catch a spy but unfairly accused many patriotic CIA officers of selling out their country. While modern CIA officers have little recollection of Angleton, his amateurish methods may have contributed to a backlash. Now security is considered a nuisance, if not an affront. The Office of Security is the enemy, called in only when it is too late. There is no mechanism for communicating to the Office of Security suspicions that may or may not turn out to be well founded. In any case, no one wants to report irregularities, because the same thing might happen to them. CIA officers consider searches of their briefcases to be humiliating. Infractions of rules and heavy drinking are tolerated, and discipline, if meted out, is lax and inconsistent.

The Office of Security itself is a disaster. Consisting of roughly five hundred of the CIA’s twenty-two thousand employees, it is staffed by people who generally have no security experience. Of the four who headed the office while
Ames was allegedly spying—James Lynch, William R. Kotapish, Frank Ruocco, and the current director, Robert H. Iwai—only Kotapish had any prior experience in security work. Ruocco, for example, was a CIA analyst. Having done little to improve CIA security, Ruocco was promoted to run the CIA’s Directorate of Administration, which includes the Office of Security. He then hired Iwai, the director when Ames was arrested, who was previously in the satellite business.

In contrast to the FBI, the Office of Security does not know how to develop informants by gaining the confidence of employees. Unlike FBI polygraph examiners, CIA examiners routinely accept cover stories given by subjects to explain why they failed the tests. That happened when the office passed all of the thirty-eight Cuban agents who were working for the CIA in 1987. It turned out nearly all of them were secretly working for Fidel Castro. Meanwhile, the FBI had flunked nearly all the Cuban agents who were also working for Castro and had wanted to provide information to the bureau. The reason is that ultimately, the princes of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations want everyone to pass to show what a good job they are doing. Because of their political clout within the agency, they can ensure that that happens by pressuring the Office of Security to look for ways to pass agents or employees who should be flunked.

“The system tends to protect people with problems,” one of Ames’s coworkers said.

A day after Ames’s arrest was announced, Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey, who had become DCI in 1993, met with CIA employees in the agency’s 7,000-square-foot auditorium. After recounting what employees already knew from the press about the case, Woolsey—whose address was seen by every CIA employee on classified closed-circuit television—spent five minutes explaining why he had himself refused to take a polygraph test, as other recent directors had done. Besides the fact that he was a political appointee and thus did not have to, Woolsey said he remained “skeptical” about the polygraph’s effectiveness.

Woolsey’s performance sickened many CIA officers, who
pointed out that they, too, have questions about the efficacy of the polygraph but are required to take the test or lose their jobs. The fact that Woolsey would not take the examination—and then had the effrontery to defend his decision even after the revelation of the biggest security breach in the history of the CIA—tells a lot about the air of indifference that allowed the Ames case to happen. But it also underscores how effectively the CIA has covered up its own incompetence. For contrary to initial news reports and to the impression Woolsey conveyed, the polygraph was stunningly accurate in Ames’s case.

In fact, after Ames passed his first polygraph test when he entered the CIA in 1962, he flunked every subsequent test. Even in 1976, when he had not yet begun spying, Ames failed when asked if he had had any unauthorized contact with foreign nationals. In 1986, a year after he was said to have begun spying, Ames took a third test and flunked again, this time on the question of whether any foreign intelligence service had “pitched” him—tried to recruit him to spy. Ames insisted then that he had flunked because he was worried that Vitaly Yurchenko—whom he had helped debrief in 1985—had given his identity to the Soviets when Yurchenko redefected. The examiner bought the story.