They Wouldn't Know a Mole If It Bit Them

By Elaine Shannon/Washington

As a rookie spy, he left a briefcase stuffed with classified documents on a New York City subway train. He strewed clandestine communications gear around his office, unsecured. He couldn't account for Company money or for himself. His falling-down-drunk episodes were legion, including one at a CIA Christmas party when he had to be carted home. Even when sober, he had incompetence written all over him. A pre-employment psychological assessment found him lacking the people skills essential for spy work. Yet the CIA, desperate for warm bodies during the Vietnam War, hired him anyway. His first boss, the station chief in Ankara, Turkey, warned that the new agent was so inept at recruiting agents that he should never be sent to the field again.

That wise counsel was ignored, as was a profusion of red flags that marked the sorry career of Aldrich Hazen Ames, 53, who was finally convicted last April after spying nine years for the Soviet Union. Intelligence documents obtained last week by TIME, including parts of the CIA inspector general's report on the Ames case, illustrate how badly the agency bungled its handling of the agent. Strong evidence of his poor performance, and later his treason, were ignored for years by an old-boy network that included friends of Ames' father Carleton, himself a hard-drinking CIA veteran.

Tensions between the Old Guard and CIA Director James Woolsey, a political appointee, erupted last week when Woolsey learned that two top agency officials had on Sept. 29 given an award to a retiring field officer under investigation in the Ames case. That agent, Milton Bearden, who has retired as chief of the CIA station in Bonn, is widely respected for his work in helping Muslim rebels drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. But Bearden has also been reprimanded for his inattention to Ames' activities when he was the spy's boss in 1989. Woolsey had ordered that none of those reprimanded in the Ames case be given promotions, raises or commendations. Last week he demoted the officers who violated that order; both men then retired rather than accept a lower rank.

Members of Congress who oversee the CIA viewed the episode as a characteristic case of arrogance within the agency's Directorate of Operations, the branch in charge of covert missions. And, said a White House official, "What we can't understand is why Woolsey keeps loyally defending an operations directorate that keeps thumbing its nose at him. He needs to clean house." Critics will gain ammunition from the fresh details contained in classified documents. Among them:

Ames devised a crude but effective cover scheme so that he could approach the KGB without arousing the suspicions of FBI agents. In April 1985 he arranged to meet with Sergei Chuvakin, then a Soviet embassy diplomat. (Chuvakin, who now works for the Russian Foreign Ministry, told TIME's James L. Graff that he doesn't recall meeting the U.S. spy.) Ames says he told Chuvakin that he had an innocuous reason for the meeting: to discuss broad foreign policy issues. At the same time, Ames told the CIA and the FBI that he was trying to recruit Chuvakin. But Ames failed to file regular and detailed reports of his meetings with Chuvakin. If CIA managers had monitored him more closely, they might have discovered his ruse. In fact, Ames told the CIA's investigators this year, he used the unwitting Soviet as cover to pass a message to the KGB. When he called for Chuvakin at the Soviet embassy, Ames, without uttering a word, slipped the receptionist an envelope addressed to the senior KGB officer there. The packet contained the names of three Soviets who had offered to work for the CIA, and whom the CIA knew to be "dangles," or double agents who remained loyal to the U.S.S.R. This helped establish Ames' access to secrets, as did a page ripped from a CIA directory (which is not available to the public) with his name highlighted. The last item was a demand for $50,000.

When the KGB ponied up the $50,000, Ames told investigators, he was hooked. In June 1985 he crammed 5 to 7 lbs. of secret documents into plastic bags, toted them past the security guards at CIA headquarters and delivered the bags to the KGB. Inside was the stuff of spies' dreams: the names of 10 Soviets who had been recruited by Western intelligence agencies to steal secrets from Soviet military, intelligence or political establishments.

For a while, the Ames betrayals prompted CIA officials to suspect that the Soviets were intercepting their communications, so they transmitted a series of false messages to a field office, hoping to provoke the KGB into reacting. Nothing happened, which should have prompted the CIA into looking elsewhere, but the agency, reluctant to believe one of its own was a traitor, failed to launch a rigorous investigation.

Finally, in January 1986 the chief of the Soviet division in the CIA's Directorate of Operations realized there might be a human leak, so he sharply reduced access to the most valuable secrets, setting up a "back room" to handle sensitive cases against the Soviets. There was just one problem: among the handful of officers with access to the back room was Aldrich Ames.

With reporting by James L. Graff/Vienna and Douglas Waller/Washington