How Spies Die

Just before noon on most days in 1969, I'd take a lazy drive through the streets of Da Nang, a port city in Vietnam. I would stop at some point for a walk along the riverfront, or browse for a few minutes at a newsstand or stroll through the chaotic marketplace. Later I would drive to the city soccer field, where I looked for a small chalk mark on a faded yellow wall, a signal from one of my agents that he had reports to deliver.

This was my little corner of the Vietnam war, a dark arena of spies and jangling nerves where my hands could turn cold under the scorching tropical sun. I was only 24, a novice operative with Army Intelligence. By day I worked undercover as a civilian official, but my real mission was gathering intelligence on key members of the Viet Cong's civilian underground.

One hour after spotting the chalk mark, I would go to a prearranged place on a beach, where I would wait for a young boy peddling ice cream. I'd buy a cone wrapped in thin white paper with a coded message written on it.

One day I discovered that an agent had gone bad, and that's when my nightmare began.

All those memories came flooding back a few months ago when the FBI arrested Aldrich "Rick" Hazen Ames, a high-ranking CIA officer who the authorities said had spent nine years working in secret for Moscow. Ames, in spy parlance, was a mole--"every director's nightmare," as former CIA chief Richard Helms put it--who had carried out the worst act of betrayal in CIA history.

So far.

The arrest of Ames, 53, featured the most celebrated symbol of Russian treachery since Soviet bugs were discovered 42 years ago inside the official seal (continued on page 80)How Spies Die(continued from page 77) of the U.S. embassy in Moscow: a sturdy blue Washington, D.C. mailbox with a thin white chalk mark on the side. The scratch, the FBI said, was a "load signal" the Russians used to communicate with their mole. Some things never change.

The mailbox became a symbol of the FBI case against Ames and his Colombian wife, Maria del Rosario Ames, who was heard in government wiretaps nagging Ames about his absentminded handling of ill-gotten Russian cash. Both pleaded guilty in a deal that will put him in jail for the rest of his life and lock up Rosario for at least several years. Meanwhile, their five-year-old son, Paul, is in Colombia in the care of his grandmother. Rosario's sentence will probably depend on how cooperative Ames is with government interrogators. Without a trial the public will probably remain ignorant of all the details of the case, forever.

A fastidious man with a stylish mustache, Ames had been on Moscow's payroll since at least May 1985, the government charged. And what a payroll it was. According to bank records seized by the FBI, Ames earned at least $2.7 million in those nine years, and he spent the money conspicuously. He and his wife paid $540,000 cash for a house in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, redecorated it twice for thousands more, ran up credit card bills of nearly a half million dollars, bought a $40,000 Jaguar and took frequent vacations. On shopping trips to New York City, they often dined at La Côte Basque.

If neighbors wondered how his $68,800 government salary could support such a lifestyle, Ames apparently let them believe that Maria had received an inheritance. Eventually, a few alert security types asked Ames about his newfound wealth, and he cited his wife's nonexistent money. Along the way he managed to get by two routine lie-detector exams, for which the CIA has a touching regard.

Even when a local bank reported Ames' large deposits and frequent foreign-wire deposits to the Treasury Department, as required by law, no alarms went off at the CIA.

The agency's counterintelligence staff, hundreds of men and women charged with protecting the agency's ranks against enemy penetration, apparently missed all this. In fact, Ames was promoted to a senior counterintelligence job in the Soviet branch, which recruits and manages every spy the CIA has working against Moscow.

This was very odd. Could the CIA be that dumb? Yes! the media chorus replied. One cartoon depicted "Agent Ameski" sitting at his CIA desk in a trench coat, fedora and dark glasses. Critics pointed out that this was the same CIA that missed the collapse of the Soviet Union and couldn't find Scuds in an Iraqi desert.

But, as easy as it was to mock the CIA, some law enforcement and counterintelligence personnel suspected, as I did, that the story was not that simple. They sensed that the truth might resemble a complicated mechanism, with wheels spinning inside wheels.

Listening to the wheels spin is, of course, a safecracker's art and a specialty of people in the shadowy world of espionage. I spoke with several such veterans after Ames' arrest and they had their ears to the safe, trying to pick up the faint but telltale sounds of the mystery's pieces falling into place. Some seasoned CIA operatives saw Ames as a pawn in Moscow's deadly game. Their theory went like this:

Pretend you are the chief of the KGB, now the Russian SVRR. You have two moles in the CIA. One of them is Aldrich Ames; the other is even higher in the ranks. In 1991, perhaps earlier, you learn that a mole hunt is underway and that the CIA has set computer traps to snare Ames.

You warn him to be careful, but his thirst for money is unquenchable. With swelling arrogance, he virtually dares the CIA to catch him.

He has always been somewhat reckless, but, for that matter, so are some of your own operatives. (In 1989 someone sent Ames photos of a rustic spot the KGB had picked out for his retirement dacha.) In the midst of a CIA investigation, such sloppy security practices are even more risky.

Ames is valuable, but you realize he is also expendable. Indeed, the more the spotlight falls on Ames' scandalous behavior, the safer it is for your other high-ranking moles. So you encourage Ames to get more documents. You continue to set up dead drops in Washington, marking mailboxes with load signals. You give him even more money, which can be traced easily. Your agents meet with him in Caracas and Bogotá.

In this scenario, the Russians deliberately acted in startling violation of their own elementary security rules.

Enter Vitaly Yurchenko, a high-ranking KGB officer who defected to the U.S. in 1985, and who is another wheel in the complicated mechanism. Yurchenko had been Moscow's man in charge of North American spying operations. He told the CIA that there was a traitor in its ranks, code-named Robert, who was about to be sent to Moscow to take over several agents. That led the CIA to suspect a former trainee, Edward Lee Howard, who had been fired after flunking a polygraph exam on the eve of a posting to Moscow.

Howard fled in September 1985 before the FBI was able to arrest him, and he surfaced in Moscow. Around that time, CIA operations in the Soviet Union began to dry up. A number of its spies vanished and, according to later reports, were shot. The agency chalked their disappearances up to Howard's betrayal.

Then, to everyone's surprise, Yurchenko returned to Moscow. One evening, three months after arriving in Washington, the mysterious Russian got up from his table at a Georgetown restaurant and walked out, telling his CIA escort that he'd be back. The next day he turned up at the Soviet embassy in downtown Washington, where he declared he had been kidnapped and drugged by the CIA and brought to the U.S. against his will.

The CIA maintained that Yurchenko was a bona fide defector. After all, Yurchenko gave up Howard, as well as clues to a spy inside the National Security Agency named Ronald Pelton. The Russian simply decided to go home, the CIA insisted. Later, word leaked from CIA sources that Yurchenko had likely been executed.

Fast-forward nine years. It now turns out that one of Yurchenko's CIA debriefers was none other than Rick Ames. Did Yurchenko know that Ames was working for Moscow? It's possible that Ames was so important that even Yurchenko did not know about him. We may never know what each of them knew during those face-to-face encounters.

We do know, however, that Ames continued spying for nearly another decade and that Yurchenko was not executed as the CIA had suggested in 1985. A daughter of a former Soviet diplomat told one of my CIA contacts that she saw Yurchenko decked out in the uniform of a Soviet admiral while attending a private party in Moscow shortly before Ames was arrested.

Mark Wyatt, a CIA officer who was called out of retirement to review the Yurchenko "defection," now believes that the Russian tricked the CIA. Yurchenko, Wyatt says, "played the game the way he was supposed to. He did his job and did it well. He came over on a mission. He leaked Howard and Pelton to us to protect a supermole, Ames."

Wyatt is also suspicious of the way the Russians handled Ames. "In my experience, the Soviets never meet with agents in the country where the agents are assigned," he says. He is "astounded" that the KGB allowed Ames to continue his wild spending, especially after it sent him a nine-page letter of warning in 1989. It was almost as if it wanted Ames to be caught.

So does this suggest that the Russians gave up Ames to protect another mole?

"Exactly," says Wyatt.

•

The lessons began right away.

"You are going to learn espionage," the instructor said. "You are going to learn how to lie, steal and cheat in the service of Uncle Sam."

It was the summer of 1967. Thirty of us were crammed into a hot classroom at the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, Maryland, in a gritty industrial section of Baltimore. We were learning how to be spies. A red sign on the wall warned that the lecture was classified Secret-Noforn.

The instructor tapped the sign. Anything that got out of the classroom could cause grave damage to national security, he explained, especially if it were disclosed to an unauthorized foreigner, and that included our allies. In fact, he went on, in the espionage business we have no allies. Regarding our British, French, German and South Vietnamese friends--we spied on them and they spied on us. And we were there to learn to do just that.

The essence of espionage, we were quickly instructed, was persuading people to commit treason. Anybody who wanted to resign from the class could leave right then, no questions asked. All but one of us stayed. The inculcation began.

To accomplish a mission, instructors said, obstacles were to be surmounted by any means necessary. The tricks of the business were called tradecraft. By the end of the day we understood that our jobs might require us to open mail, tap telephones, bribe officials and burglarize embassies. We would work under false names with forged documents, usually under Defense Department or other official cover. We might be placed with commercial firms, or we'd set up our own phony companies.

We had to live a lie convincingly enough to deflect cocktail chatter or a sudden police inquiry. What we were doing must be kept from strangers, friends, colleagues and families.

All this led to our adopting a clandestine mentality. For most of us it was a whole new way of looking at the world, a revelation that we were no longer bound by the legal, ethical and moral standards of society. Those had no relevance to covert operations, which were undertaken in the name of national security, the highest standard of all. The only factor to be considered was pragmatic: getting the mission done in complete secrecy. One class exercise required us to elicit an embarrassing personal detail from a fellow student, an introduction to techniques of exploiting weaknesses among trusting targets.

Not that we didn't have weaknesses of our own. Some intelligence operatives in Vietnam more than doubled their paychecks on the black market or dipped into drawers of operational cash. Others sampled the whores of Da Nang or Saigon, all in the line of duty. Heavy drinking was de rigueur in the old days, divorce a rite of passage.

In truth, a small percentage of operatives fell prey to such temptations. But in the ambience of Cold War operations, with the CIA careening from one coup to the next, its magicians dreaming up new poisons and dart guns, there was a macho, anything-goes attitude. The tough guys went up the ladder; the rest were pushed aside. For the most part, the operations personnel ran the CIA, and the analysts sat on the sidelines.

•

Some operations people regarded Ames as a wimp. "I remember him standing outside my office for some reason," said Dean Almy, a 33-year CIA operations officer who served in Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Jamaica. "He was a Sixties kind of guy with longish hair." In 1980 Almy was the CIA's New York station chief and Ames' boss. Their main target was the Soviet mission to the United Nations.

"He was bright and likable, but he never accomplished anything," Almy recalled. "Those Soviet division guys never did. The only guys who recruited any Sovs were the knuckle-draggers like me who came from Third World operations. The Sov division was always analyzing things to death."

Ames was outgoing, the son of a onetime history professor who had joined the CIA in the early Fifties. But Carleton Ames never became more than a mid-level analyst. He was an alcoholic who disappeared for weeks on end. In his stead, the family was held together by his wife, Rachel, whom friends remember as a source of compassion and integrity. She taught English at McLean High School in suburban Virginia, just down the road from CIA headquarters.

Ames started putting in hours at the agency while still at McLean High and after graduation. He officially joined the CIA on June 17, 1962--three weeks after his 21st birthday--and worked at headquarters while attending George Washington University part-time. After getting his degree in August 1967, he was selected for the agency's operations directorate. In 1969 he was dispatched to Turkey, an important keyhole into the Soviet Union. Three years later, having failed, according to CIA sources, to recruit a single agent, he returned to Washington. He stayed in D.C. until 1976, and then it was on to New York.

During the Sixties and Seventies, the CIA was jolted by a series of exposés that cast a shadow on its image as a sentinel of democracy. There was Vietnam, then Watergate, then revelations that it had spied on American citizens and supported the destabilization of the democratically elected Chilean government. A Senate committee also reported that the CIA had hired Mafia figures to assassinate Fidel Castro. A stream of books and articles detailed the agency's manipulations of student groups and unions and its testing of LSD on unwitting Americans.

Did disillusionment and resentment within the CIA ranks combine to create moles during that period? At least one man claimed he was spurred into espionage after learning of a covert CIA operation. Christopher Boyce worked for TRW Systems, an agency contractor in California that handled satellite surveillance communications. One day in 1975, Boyce said, he read messages about a CIA operation to influence Australia's elections. He became so disgusted, he later testified in court, that he decided to sell code data to the Russians. In 1977 the FBI arrested Boyce, 23, and his accomplice, Andrew Daulton Lee, 25. They were sentenced to lengthy terms in prison.

At the time, Ames was assigned to help select Soviet officials for possible recruitment. His first marriage, to a woman who also worked for the CIA, was not going well. They moved to New York together, but his career continued to be undistinguished, and in 1981, childless, she decided not to follow him to his next assignment in Mexico.

The CIA station in Mexico City occupies several floors in the U.S. embassy, a fortress-like building off the Paseo de (continued on page 155)How Spies Die(continued on page 82) la Reforma, the main street through the capital. Its principal mission when Rick Ames arrived in 1981 was to keep track of and try to recruit European communist operatives. The Sandinistas were another recruiting priority. After two years in Mexico, though, Ames' most visible accomplishment was to recruit the strong-willed, intellectually oriented cultural attaché at the Colombian embassy, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy.

She was a puzzling choice as an agent. "You normally wouldn't hire her to spy on the Colombian embassy, which is a very low priority," remarked John Horton, a onetime CIA station chief in Mexico. Even if she were hired to pass on what she had heard from flirtatious communists, her value to the CIA would have been slight.

It was even more puzzling when Ames' agent became his lover. That, say the experts in retrospect, should have been the CIA's first warning. Operations directorate people should not have noticeable romances with paid informants.

Ames' questionable relationship with Rosario continued and did not harm his career. It is possible, of course, that Ames performed his job more efficiently than government disclosures since his arrest might indicate. The fact is that he was promoted again in 1983 and returned to Washington as the chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet branch of the operations directorate. His lover came with him.

The job gave Ames access to the dossiers of every CIA informant in the Soviet Union and its embassies abroad. Was it a good spot for a mole? "There's not another GS-14 in the CIA who would've been better placed," said Dean Almy. Ames worked in Washington until 1986, when he was assigned to Rome.

No one is sure when Ames began to spy, but the FBI affidavit states that he made his first domestic deposit of Soviet money on May 18, 1985. As it happened, just two days later, John Walker was arrested, and the astonishing secrets of the spy ring he ran with members of his own family were revealed. So many spies were caught around that time that 1985 came to be known as the Year of the Spy. Ronald Pelton had sold NSA secrets for five years before Yurchenko exposed him. John Walker, it turned out, had sold cryptography secrets to the Russians for nearly 20 years, until his angry ex-wife turned him in. "Kmart protects its toothpaste better than the Navy protects its secrets," he said later.

Was Ames alarmed when people who had done exactly what he was doing went off to jail? Perhaps. But what may have impressed Ames was not that they were caught but how easy it was to escape detection.

In August 1985, about the time Yurchenko defected, Ames married Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy.

•

I once thought about going over. I knew the names and locations of communist agents who could have facilitated my defection to Hanoi. Or I could have stayed in my job and found an anonymous way to deliver information to the other side.

Such a consideration was the result of the troubling experience I had with my principal agent in Vietnam, the man at the top of the web of spies--and with my bosses. When the agent flunked a lie-detector test, I first suspected he was working for the communists. In fact, I discovered he was a secret agent for a neofascist political party and was using me to knock off the party's rivals on the left. It worked like this: My agent's job was to supply me with the names of Vietnamese citizens suspected of being members of the clandestine apparat. I gave the names to the Phoenix Program, a CIA-run operation specifically targeted against the Viet Cong political underground. On paper the Phoenix people then investigated the suspects. If the evidence warranted it, there would be arrests. As I said, that was on paper. From what I saw, the Phoenix Program was much different in practice. Its CIA hit teams got the names of suspects and killed them.

My agent had figured out how the system worked. He supplied me with the names of suspects due for certain assassination. The crisis came when I realized the names he gave me weren't communists, but Buddhists who favored a U.S. withdrawal and a negotiated end to the war. I tried to fire my agent, but because he had provided reliable reporting in other areas, Army Intelligence headquarters wouldn't let him go.

I brooded on this fatal corruption for a couple of weeks. I considered what I knew about other operations. A friend told me he had nicknamed his useless and expensive Vietnamese spooks Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. I knew of a CIA officer who embezzled money. I knew about other U.S. officials who worked the black market or sent contraband antiquities home in the diplomatic pouch. I knew about the torture that the CIA supervised in a jail near my office, and that the Air Force was secretly bombing Laos and Cambodia day and night. The whole war was a criminal enterprise, it seemed, with a price tag in dead and mutilated Vietnamese and GIs.

My hands went clammy around the ten-cent martinis at the Officers Club. Could I really help the other side? It would be so easy. I was certain I could escape detection.

Well, I suppose I was a coward. I kept my mouth shut, went home and was discharged. In going over, I decided, I would have just played into the hands of another bunch of goons in Hanoi who had never impressed me much as Jeffersonian democrats. A year or so passed and eventually I did speak out publicly against the war. And then one day in 1971 a guy showed up and asked me for names.

"If you really want to help end the war," he said, "why don't you publish the names of your agents? Or just give them to me? I'll see that they get to Hanoi."

Well, those were good questions, but I already knew my answer. I couldn't see how adding a few more corpses to the pile would help end the war. It was one thing to blow the whistle. It would have been another thing to hand over the names of people who, at worst, were just trying to make a buck, or at best, had put their lives on the line for the American ideal of freedom, imperfect as it may be.

But Aldrich Ames did just that. Information that he provided may well have led to the execution of many people, the FBI says. "He was a rat," said one former CIA man, "who jumped on a sinking ship."

•

The CIA is a peculiar institution whose ingrained ways made it easy for Ames' colleagues to ignore suspicious behavior and for him to avoid investigation. His expensive lifestyle, for example, was unremarkable. Ames fit well into the agency's tradition of genteel wits, so no one thought it implausible when he married a woman who would buy a half-million-dollar house with cash. In any case, Ames was a direct connection with the old days of the CIA, when it was not uncommon for uncashed paychecks to pile up in the desks of its wealthy employees.

Nor was it particularly odd that Ames was able to stay in the loop of sensitive documents even after he fell under suspicion and was transferred to a CIA narcotics desk in 1991. Secrets are the coin of the realm. It's only to be expected that CIA men are fascinated by them. They collect and trade secrets as if they were baseball cards.

"The fact that he got information or documents from the Soviet branch after he was transferred does not surprise me," said one CIA operative who expressed the opinion of many others. "Somebody told me about the Iranian hostage rescue attempt two weeks before it happened--the airfields we had set up, everything--and I had no need to know. You just get together with somebody you know and trust and you trade all sorts of things."

Suspicion itself was not popular around the CIA, which had been tied into knots by the notorious counterintelligence czar James Jesus Angleton who, some say, went insane chasing Soviet moles he could never find. He was fired in 1974 and died in 1987.

But now, Angleton's old allies are getting their turn at bat. In April an anonymous memo arrived at the House and Senate intelligence committee charging that the CIA's counterintelligence function "was decentralized, subordinated and deliberately designed to cover up and protect double agents and moles" after Angleton's departure. It also claimed that Ames' boss warned him he was suspected of being a mole.

•

In January 1970, a few months after I came home from Vietnam, an envelope arrived at my apartment in Boston, postmarked in Hawaii, with no return address. I opened it and found another envelope inside, this one with no markings at all. Inside that was a typed letter with no date, salutation or signature.

"I just thought you would like to know what happened after you left," it began. I knew immediately that it was from the man who had taken over my job in Da Nang.

In veiled language he told me what had happened to "Dinky," as we called the agent I had tried to fire. (The nickname was a play on his real name and the Vietnamese words for crazy, dien cai dau, literally, "electricity in the head," which GIs rendered as dinky-dow, slang for getting stoned.)

He had tried to fire Dinky, too, my successor wrote. Instead, Dinky was promoted. The Saigon intelligence command had manipulated his reports to raise his official credibility rating (and, of course, their own). So Dinky continued to provide the names of his political enemies to the U.S. intelligence system and to use the system as his personal Murder Inc. As the years went by, I often wondered what had happened to him.

The answer came out of the blue one Saturday afternoon years later when I walked into a Murphy's hardware store in Washington, D.C. There, working the cash register, was our man Dinky.

I said hello in Vietnamese. He looked at me and smiled with only a hint of recognition.

"Anything else?" he asked.

No, there really wasn't anything else.

Just like the old days, I handed him some money, and I walked out the door. I never saw him again.

I suspect many ex--CIA agents have similar stories about people getting away with intolerable conduct. Now their stories may have ominous and timely implications. The most significant, of course is that Ames was not the only mole. The CIA leadership must face the fact that it has no idea how many of its personnel have gone bad. The agency employs 20,000 people, including thousands of clerical workers and computer wonks who have access to secrets but little of the sense of family that the agency once had. And now everybody knows that even a sloppy thief can steal the agency's deepest secrets.

Before Ames, the CIA could make the case that it could police itself. That may no longer be true, especially if the FBI has anything to say about it. The two organizations cooperated in the investigation of Ames, but uncomfortably. "The FBI and the CIA do not see eye to eye," said John Greaney, a former CIA deputy counsel. The FBI, he says, wants publicity and therefore wants to disclose everything when it makes a bust. The CIA, which isn't a law-enforcement organization, would rather disclose nothing. CIA men obviously find mole hunts unpleasant. "I know of guys who were suspected of being moles," a covert-action veteran told me. "One flunked the lie detector and they just let him go. They couldn't prove it." Another case "was swept under the rug because he was a valuable asset and no one wanted to admit the bad news. That happens a lot."

The CIA bureaucracy will probably try, as it did during this mole hunt, to resist scrutiny by the FBI, even though CIA director R. James Woolsey has suggested that there are other major counterintelligence investigations in the works. It seems inevitable that the FBI and the CIA will clash again, and that's good news for any and all moles who are still at work.

Our reporter knows what it's like when a trusted agent goes bad. That's why we asked him to write about Aldrich Ames

"In 1991 you learn that a mole hunt is underway. The CIA has set computer traps to snare Ames."

"My hands went clammy around the ten-cent martinis at the Officers Club. Could I really help the other side?"