Monday, May. 22, 1995

THE AMES SPY HUNT

From the spring of 1985 until February 1994, Aldrich Ames was Moscow's master spy inside the CIA. In the course of his work on behalf of the KGB, for which he was paid or promised $4.6 million, he betrayed dozens of Soviets whom the CIA had recruited. Ten were eventually executed; others were condemned to prison sentences in the Gulag. Ames also revealed hundreds of American intelligence operations to the KGB.

Even though Ames had a history of heavy drinking, even though he had worked in the CIA's Soviet division and even though he was spending far more money than his salary would have permitted, the CIA took eight years to identify him as a mole. Fundamentally, the CIA did not want to face the possibility that it had been penetrated. As a result, the investigation dragged on and on with little encouragement or support from on high.

In the midst of this devastating episode, the perseverance, brains and character of only a handful of people stand out. One of them is a quiet, gray-haired woman named Jeanne Vertefeuille. Until now her role in tracking down Ames has never been reported, but many at the CIA call her the heroine of the investigation. The following excerpt from Nightmover, David Wise's new book about the Ames case, deals with Vertefeuille's story. "The CIA thought it had picked a minor leaguer, but she proved she was good enough for the majors," says Wise. "In the end, she got Ames."

At first glance, Jeanne Vertefeuille might have seemed an unlikely choice to hunt down the most damaging mole in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was so plain looking, so mousy and nondescript that she would never stand out in a crowd, which suited her. She had never married, as far as anyone knew. The CIA was her life. She lived alone in a condo in McLean, Virginia, so close to the CIA's headquarters in Langley that she walked to work each day. If a co-worker stopped to offer her a lift, she would not accept unless it was raining hard.

She was, however, almost preordained for the task. For years she had toiled quietly in the research section of the Soviet division and the counterintelligence staff. There was hardly an important, or even an unimportant, case involving the KGB or the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) that she did not know. Jeanne Vertefeuille could follow the tangled threads that might link a case in Kuala Lumpur 10 years ago to one in Vienna today. If a KGB colonel had appeared in Copenhagen under one name and turned up a decade later in New Delhi with another identity, give it to Jeanne-she would sort it out.

She liked to work in obscurity. Within the agency there were some who compared her to John le Carre's fictional Connie Sachs, the brilliant researcher who knew all the Soviet cases and embodied the institutional memory of the Circus. But Vertefeuille did not encourage such talk; it veered too close to a kind of celebrity.

She was fluent in French, in which her name means "green leaf." She seldom talked about herself, but it was known she had grown up in the Northeast. She had been posted to Ethiopia in the late 1950s and served in the CIA station in Finland in the early 1960s and in the Hague in the mid-1960s. In the early 1970s she had found her metier, counterintelligence--combatting opposition spies and moles--when she was appointed head of the research section in the Soviet division's counterintelligence group, then chief of the branch that maintained biographies on Soviet and East European operatives. When a new KGB officer popped up in Bangkok, or the agency was targeting a GRU colonel in Prague as a possible recruit, the field would ask headquarters to run name traces on these individuals to see what the CIA's computers might hold. Vertefeuille was in charge of that process.

In 1984 she was named chief of station in Gabon, in West Africa. Even today, in the male-dominated CIA, there are relatively few women station chiefs, and her appointment more than a decade ago was an unusual recognition of her talents. Never mind that Gabon had not even had a station chief until three years before or that Vertefeuille ran a one-woman station, in charge only of herself, an assistant and a code clerk. The point was, she was a COS.

When Vertefeuille went to Gabon, Aldrich Ames was working in Langley as Soviet branch chief in the counterintelligence division. On June 13, 1985, in his fourth-floor office, he wrapped up between 5 and 7 lbs. of cable traffic and other secret documents in plastic bags, walked out to the parking lot and drove across the Potomac to Chadwick's, a Washington saloon under the K Street Freeway in Georgetown. There he met Sergei Chuvakhin, the first secretary of the Soviet embassy in Washington, and handed him the plastic bags.

It was the largest amount of sensitive data ever passed to the KGB in a single meeting. Inside the bags was the most secret information Langley possessed-the names of some of the most important Soviet sources working for the CIA and FBI.

During the course of the next 12 months, Ames lunched with Chuvakhin at least 14 times. He had a perfect cover because his CIA superiors had authorized him to meet with Soviet officials to try to recruit them. At his lunches with Chuvakhin, he continued providing all sorts of classified documents to the KGB, including the identity of more Soviet sources. The results were immediate and devastating. In the fall of 1985 and continuing into early 1986, some 20 CIA agents in the Soviet Union simply disappeared, vanishing off the agency's screen.

It was clear--or should have been--that something had gone terribly wrong. The likelihood that all these agents had been arrested because they or the CIA made operational mistakes simply defied the law of averages and common sense. Some other explanation--a compromised code or a KGB penetration of CIA communications--was possible, but remote. Everything pointed toward a human penetration. A mole.

It was a hideous prospect--that someone inside the CIA was betraying the agency's operations to the KGB. Faced with a disaster of such apocalyptic proportions, the agency might have been expected to turn Langley upside down. To pull out all the stops. To launch a major investigation. It did not.

Among the senior officials at the directorate of operations, there was a presumption that no colleague could be a traitor. Still, the possibility of a mole could not be discounted. In January 1986, CIA Director William Casey asked for a review of the compromised agents. Although that report concluded that they had probably been lost for operational reasons, Clair George, the deputy director for operations, did not agree. He told Casey, "I think we've been penetrated." Not until October 1986, however--almost a year after the CIA began to realize it had a serious problem--did it finally act to try to pinpoint the source of the trouble. George ordered Gus Hathaway, the counterintelligence chief, to appoint a small special task force to study the problem. Hathaway named Vertefeuille, who had returned from Gabon, as the head of the task force.

At first the team consisted of only four people. It would have to start from scratch in analyzing the unexplained losses and trying to find their cause. Not a single member was trained in criminal work. It was clear from the resources allocated to Vertefeuille that finding the mole was not a high priority among the CIA's leaders. Why not? "They didn't want to know," said one intelligence official. "If you find a mole, you have to deal with him. It becomes embarrassingly public."

To help her, Vertefeuille had only Fran Smith, a veteran in the Soviet division, and two retirees, Benjamin Franklin Pepper and Daniel Niesciur. Later, Sandy Grimes, another experienced officer in the Soviet division, joined the team. The assignment of three women--Vertefeuille, Smith and Grimes--reflected a sexist belief among the CIA's senior male executives that "little gray-haired old ladies," as one case officer put it, were best suited to perform the painstaking work of catching a mole. Computers might help, the prevailing wisdom went, but only the women had the patience and the skills to go through mountains of files and extract clues.

The special task force was housed on the second floor at Langley, just another office among the several of the counterintelligence staff. The existence of the unit and the work it was performing were tightly held secrets.

Vertefeuille's job, and the team's, was to look at all the compromised cases and to discover, first, which CIA offices had handled or known of them and which officers had access to the files. They were asked to find any common strands among the cases that might provide clues to what had happened. And they were asked to determine how many cases might have been betrayed by Edward Lee Howard, the former CIA officer who sold secrets to the KGB, escaped into the New Mexico desert in 1985 and surfaced in Moscow a year later. Of the cases Howard had not known about, Vertefeuille and her team were asked to determine how many might be explained by other factors, such as sloppiness on the part of either the agent or the CIA case officer.

The task force did not have an easy time. It was not only the lack of support from above, the atmosphere of languid unconcern that permeated the agency's executive suite. The KGB made its own contribution. From the start the KGB assumed that the CIA would look for a penetration after its agents began disappearing. Moscow therefore did everything it could to deflect the attention of the mole hunters and send them down blind alleys.

The KGB forced some of the agents already arrested and imprisoned to take part in various schemes to mislead the CIA. For example, one source arrested by the KGB was made to contact a person in the U.S. in an effort to convince the FBI that his life was normal and he was having no problems. In addition, Soviet officials, prodded by the KGB, would deftly leak information to CIA officers suggesting that agents had been lost because they had made mistakes.

This game tied up Vertefeuille and her tiny staff for several years. In 1986 and 1987 the team held a series of meetings with an FBI task force called anlace, which had been set up to try to discover why two KGB officers working for the FBI in Washington had been executed after they returned to Moscow. Then in 1988, the CIA established a new counterintelligence center and folded Vertefeuille and her tiny band of mole hunters into it. She was put in charge of a branch that had responsibility for investigating all cases involving possible penetration of the CIA. The members of Vertefeuille's team were assigned to other cases that were deemed more important than the ones the task force had been set up to probe.

Then in November 1989, the CIA received its first tip pointing to Aldrich Ames. A woman employee of the agency who knew Ames well reported that he had bought an expensive house and was living beyond his means. (Ames had been earning around $50,000 a year in 1985 when he first became a traitor.) The informant also knew that Ames had access to the compromised Soviet cases. And she knew that his wife Rosario did not come from a wealthy family. Based on this information, the CIA's Dan Payne, a young man who was the only investigator assigned to Vertefeuille's unit, began a routine inquiry into Ames' spending. Payne examined real estate records in Arlington County and found that Ames had paid $540,000 for his house. There was no record of a mortgage. He asked the Treasury Department whether Ames' name had shown up on any currency transaction reports, which require banks and merchants to notify the government of cash payments in amounts larger than $10,000. Payne got three hits.

The CIA now knew that Ames had bought a half-million-dollar house in cash, that he was putting large chunks of cash in the bank and that he was an officer with access to the blown Soviet cases. It also knew from the informant that his wife's family was not independently wealthy. Yet no flashing red lights and alarm bells went off in Langley.

Ames seemed almost within the mole hunters' grasp, but he slipped away. In January 1990, Dan Payne was assigned to begin a two-month training course. No one was brought in to replace him. When he returned in March, he was pulled off the Ames investigation and sent overseas to pursue another lead in the mole hunt that proved to be a wild goose chase.

From July 1986 until July 1989, Ames served in Rome as a CIA officer at the American embassy. During his posting, he distinguished himself by getting drunk at a reception in the U.S. ambassador's garden and passing out in the gutter, where the carabinieri picked him up and took him to the hospital. In Rome Ames met repeatedly with his KGB handlers. He also bought his first Jaguar.

Fifteen months after his return to Langley, Ames was, astonishingly, assigned to the CIA counterintelligence center. He was given this assignment even though he was under investigation. The master mole was now working in the very CIA component designed to protect the agency against penetration: the center was supposed to find moles.

Fortunately, Ames was not assigned to the mole-hunt unit itself. Instead he was given a position in the U.S.S.R. branch of the center's analysis group. This meant Ames was preparing studies of KGB operations, which was truly placing the fox in charge of the chicken coop. In effect, the KGB was now in a position to read, and influence, the content of the CIA's reports on the KGB. In the counterintelligence center, Ames had access to highly sensitive data bases that contained the details, among other subjects, of double-agent cases. He could and did browse at leisure through the secret electronic files. For the KGB, it was rather like subscribing to a new and highly classified data base called CIA Online.

On Dec. 5, 1990, Dan Payne sent a memo to the CIA's office of security asking that it open an investigation of Ames based on his "lavish spending habits over the past five years." The memo noted that Ames was working in the counterintelligence center and had bought a second Jaguar after returning from Rome. "There is a degree of urgency involved in our request," Payne wrote. "Since Ames has been assigned to CIC, his access has been limited. Unfortunately, we are quickly running out of things for him to do without granting him greater access."

Early in 1991, Paul Redmond became deputy chief of the counterintelligence center. He intensely disliked Ames, whom he had supervised in the past. Once again Redmond was Ames' boss, and they clashed frequently. A short, brusque man given to profanity in both English and Serbo-Croatian, Redmond, like Vertefeuille, had for years remained deeply troubled about the reasons why the CIA had lost so many agents in 1985 and '86. In his new position, he had access to information about Ames' high living and suspected Ames as a possible mole. Redmond's personal antipathy toward Ames only reinforced his suspicions.

In April 1991, Redmond and Vertefeuille went to the FBI and met with Raymond Mislock Jr., chief of the Soviet section of the intelligence division, and Robert Wade, the assistant section chief. Redmond told the two FBI men that the agency was reviving the mole hunt. The two organizations agreed to join forces. Now, for the first time, the agency and the bureau formed a joint mole-hunt team. Jeanne Vertefeuille remained in charge of the CIA side.

On Nov. 12, 1991, the joint team interviewed Ames. He had no doubt about what was going on. Twice he volunteered that he had received a security violation while in the Soviet division for leaving a safe open. The safe, Ames added helpfully, had contained chronologies of Soviet cases and the combinations to other safes. It seems clear, in retrospect, that Ames was trying to explain a possible cause of the 1985 agent losses while deflecting suspicion that he was himself the mole. The mole hunters did not buy it. They decided to run a computer search of directorate of operations records for every mention of Ames' name in the CIA's files, something that was not done on any other suspect.

Let the hunters hunt--a mole must enjoy life to the hilt while he can. In January 1992 Ames bought his third Jaguar. He traded in his 2 1/2-year-old white one for a red XJ6. As he had done all along, Ames blithely drove his Jaguar into the CIA parking lot every workday.

That spring the joint mole-hunt unit decided to take another look at Ames' wealth. Paul Redmond assigned the task to Dan Payne, who had begun the financial inquiry three years earlier but been pulled off it. Ames was also the only suspect singled out for this type of investigation.

This time the agency invoked legal provisions allowing it to query banks and credit companies. In June responses began to flow in, and the task force learned for the first time that Aldrich and Rosario Ames were spending at least $30,000 a month with credit cards. By August the team knew that hundreds of thousands of dollars had been deposited in Ames' accounts in the Dominion Bank of Virginia, much of the money from wire transfers of undetermined origin. As the mole hunters dug into Ames' bank accounts in the fall of 1992, they discovered that by that time, wire transfers of about $1 million and cash deposits of more than $500,000 had been made.

In 1992, as the mole hunters drew closer to their target, Jeanne Vertefeuille turned 60, and under CIA rules she had to take mandatory retirement. She had searched for the traitor for almost six years and could have gone off to the Sunbelt to enjoy life, like so many of her colleagues. But Vertefeuille was not about to give up the chase, especially now. She returned to the CIA on contract with no interruption of her employment.

It was Sandy Grimes who in October 1992 made the breakthrough. She correlated the dates of Ames' meetings with Chuvakhin in 1985 and 1986--which were known to the CIA and the FBI--with the dates of his bank deposits. She found that many of the deposits came right after the luncheons. Now, in October 1992, the mole hunters were reasonably sure that they had their quarry, and that it was Rick Ames.

In January 1993, Vertefeuille's team, persuaded that Ames was the mole, began briefing the FBI so the bureau could take over the case (the CIA has no powers of arrest). It was not until after mid-March, however, that the FBI was convinced that the target of the investigation should be Ames. By early May, the FBI was ready to move. "We opened the case on Ames on May 12, 1993," said John Lewis, the FBI's No. 2 counterintelligence official, who supervised the investigation. "We called it Nightmover."

The code name stood for both the investigation and Ames himself. Lewis chose Les Wiser, a 38-year-old FBI agent, to head the team that kept Ames and his wife under surveillance for nine months. The FBI tapped the couple's phone, bugged their house, combed through their trash, downloaded Ames' computer, followed him to Bogota and gathered the evidence it needed to prove he was a spy.

Nightmover ended on the morning of Feb. 21, 1994, when Ames left his house in Arlington, stepped into his Jaguar and drove into an FBI roadblock a short distance away. The arrest of Ames and his wife came one day before he was scheduled to leave for Moscow on CIA business. The FBI was not about to risk Ames' going to Russia and perhaps never coming back. Slouched in the back of the car that took him to the bureau's office at Tysons Corner, Virginia, Ames repeated to himself again and again, "Think . Think . Think." He knew that all sorts of incriminating documents, including computer disks and letters to the KGB, were in his house and in his computer. It was over.

On April 28, 1994, Ames was sentenced to life in prison. The very next day, he was brought to the Tysons Corner FBI office for debriefing. Officials would begin the process of questioning him fully about his activities and his knowledge of the KGB. The debriefers were in place around a polished conference table. From the FBI there were Les Wiser, James Milburn and special agents Mike Donner and Rudy Guerin. Mark Hulkower, who has successfully prosecuted the Ameses for the government, represented the U.S. Attorney's office. The only person from the CIA was Jeanne Vertefeuille. Ames was brought in, handcuffed. He spotted Vertefeuille right away. He knew she was on the task force that had tracked him down. Mole hunter and quarry were finally face-to-face.

Ames nodded to her. "Hi, Jeanne," he said.

"Hi, Rick," said Vertefeuille. And for the first time in a long while, she allowed herself a smile.

Ames leaned across the table and shook hands with each of the debriefers, including Vertefeuille, although he hesitated for a moment before shaking hands with Hulkower, the energetic young prosecutor who had put him and Rosario in prison. But then he did.

Ames made an opening statement. He had participated in a number of debriefings on the other side of the table, and he would handle this one in a professional manner, as he would have done if he were still in his former role. The debriefers went along with that. The goal was to extract as much information as possible from him; if that meant treating him like a fellow professional--which is what he badly seemed to want--then they would.

Rudy Guerin, looking more like a young English professor than an FBI agent, led the session. Did Ames know of any other moles in the CIA? No. In other agencies of the U.S. government? No. It was near lunchtime, and sandwiches were brought in. Ames chain-smoked through the session, which lasted a few hours, and ate two sandwiches. The questioning went on as Guerin led Ames through the history of his espionage.

Then the debriefing took a dramatic and unexpected turn. Ames explained how worried he was in late 1985 and early 1986 when the Soviets so swiftly arrested the agents he had betrayed. He had talked to the KGB in Rome about it and said that the sudden loss of agents might lead the CIA to look for a mole and jeopardize his safety. The Soviets had asked, What can we do to help you? Is there anyone you can blame? They suggested that if Ames provided the name of another CIA officer, then the KGB would plant clues that the innocent person was the mole. The officer would be framed.

Ames looked at Jeanne Vertefeuille, who sat across the table from him.

"You're not going to like this," he said, "but I gave them your name."