Rock, Paper, Scissors

ALDRICH AMES & THE PRICE OF BETRAYAL

Aldrich Ames died this past week, in federal prison. He was career CIA, thirty-two years, and a Russian asset inside the agency for the last nine of them. He sold his country out for the money, but the cost in human lives came higher. When he named names, they were executed.

The crazy thing about Ames is how long it took to catch him. There are some similarities to Kim Philby, here. The institutional reluctance to believe there’s a worm in your own apple. Philby was a deep-cover agent, a defector in place, from his time in Spain – the Civil War, accredited to Franco’s falange in 1937 – until Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow, in 1951, and Philby resigned from MI6. (Even then, he wasn’t confirmed as a KGB mole for another ten years.) Ames, too, seems to have flown under the radar while the clock kept ticking.

Ames began selling secrets to the Russians in 1985, and KGB began rolling up the CIA assets he exposed as soon as they had their names. This is actually bad spycraft, and Ames complained to his handlers about it. The fact that American agents were being snapped up so fast would alert CIA to the possibility of an inside leak. But in fact, Langley slow-walked the idea of a penetration, and focused instead on communications security, thinking overseas installations could have been bugged, or encryption systems had been compromised. KGB, in turn, mounted deception operations, trailing false leads to throw the spy hunters off the scent. They almost certainly sacrificed Edward Lee Howard to protect Ames. Howard was another Soviet double agent, already under suspicion – and FBI surveillance – when he slipped the leash and escaped to Russia. A lot of the damage done to CIA covert operations in-country could conveniently be blamed on Howard, and in the meantime, Ames was free to create chaos.

A counterintelligence team was assigned to investigate the suspected security breach in 1986, so the agency wasn’t asleep at the wheel, but insiders would remember the Golitsin-Nosenko controversy, and James Angleton’s campaign to find a CIA mole, which did as much harm to Langley as a targeted KGB deception – some said it was a KGB deception – and the team’s mandate was over-cautious, casting a wide net. They didn’t discount the possibility of a hostile penetration, but they didn’t narrow it down to that unhappy and explicit suspicion for four more years.

Ames was caught, in the end, because of his own arrogance: lavish over-spending, champagne on a beer budget. And because of the relentless pursuit by two of the lead investigators on the leak team, Jeanne Vertefeuille and Sandy Grimes: they knew a spy was betraying CIA secrets to the Russians, it was only a matter of cross-collateralizing the paper trail, and he’d rise to the surface.

Ames was a GS-14, paid 60K a year. He’d always been an off-the-rack guy, and suddenly he was sporting bespoke suits. His teeth were stained by tobacco use; he got them capped. He bought a Jaguar XJ-6, and a half-million-dollar house. He paid cash.

The money was funneled through an embassy contact, Sergei Chuvakhin, the KGB resident who was Ames’ handler. Grimes and Vertefeuille matched the meet times between Ames and Chuvakhin, and cash deposits in Ames’ bank account. It’s one of the interesting ironies in the case that Ames had suggested to KGB that Vertefeuille, because of her position inside CIA counterintelligence, and her access to secure materials, would make a good patsy, if they could frame her as the spy. That would have been a masterful plot twist.

The leak team had decided, by 1990, that there was a mole, but they didn’t know who. Sandy Grimes suspected Ames, but it wasn’t until 1992 that she made the money connection to Chuvakhin as the bagman. And it was early 1993, when the FBI began their criminal investigation, and put Ames under surveillance. Grimes and Vertefeuille had kept their own internal investigation close and compartmentalized, but Ames must have known the wolves were circling. Early in 1994, he was scheduled to go to a conference in Moscow, but to the FBI, it looked like too easy an opportunity for him to jump the fence, and they moved in for the arrest. He told them it was a mistake, and they had the wrong guy, but I find it hard to believe he was surprised, in the end.

There are two stories, here. (Three, of course, if you count what happened to those poor bastards in Russia that Ames gave up to the KGB.) But as a Cold War cautionary tale, we have the treason itself, on the one hand, and as a parallel narrative, the hunt to expose the spy.

Defectors are an odd bunch, it’s said, no one of them the same, but by and large, people commit treason for three basic reasons, money, political conviction, or because they’ve been pressured into it. Security services prefer recruitment through money or blackmail. Ideology is too volatile, people can have a change of heart. Better you’ve got them by the balls.

In this context, Philby is a cipher. Not to glamorize him – he was a vile snake – but in Brit spy mythology, he’s taken on an air of mystery. That whole crew, the Cambridge spies, are allowed a sort of cachet I think is undeserved. The driving force seems to have been a contempt for Englishness, of what passes for decency, meaning the common virtue. Those privileged, condescending college boys were too sophisticated to fall for that self-satisfied, landed gentry crap, Little England. They’d outrage convention and confound expectations, ablaze like comets.

Our two homegrown turncoats, Ames and Robert Hanssen, at the FBI, suffer by comparison. They’re generic white-bread American vulgarity, Walmart, not Harrod’s.

Spy-hunters, too, are a particular breed. The devil is in the details. You go down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. In the case of Sandy Grimes, she had an axe to grind. One of the assets Ames burned was the GRU general Dmitri Polyakov, a CIA agent in place for twenty years, and when Grimes was assigned to the Soviet Russia division, she’d had a proprietary interest in Polyakov. He was one of her Ivans. Polyakov was exposed and executed, and Grimes had the unwelcome foreboding of a KGB footprint inside CIA. She was one of the first to suspect a live source, and not Russian intercepts of their secure communications. She had him in her sights, in silhouette. She knew he was there. He was necessary. His presence, his mass, was pulling other planetary objects out of orbit. If she could map those orbital declinations, she could triangulate his gravitational influence, and pinpoint his position, visible or not. And she found him, by process of elimination.

There’s a moral, I suppose. Not the one we want, treason never prospers, but something more ambiguous. Spying isn’t going to stop. We’ll keep looking for advantage, and so will our adversaries. It seems a natural consequence. I think you can make the case (and I have) that the more transparent we are to our enemies, and our enemies to us, the less chance there is of accident or miscalculation. This was true, in Europe, during the Cold War, when we were at the brink with the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact, in Berlin, in Budapest, in Prague. The fact that we had an accurate breakdown of their Order of Battle – infantry, armor, and air – a complete picture of their equipment and its performance margins, and their readiness, in terms of manpower and depth of command authority, meant that we could report in real time, twenty-four/seven, on any troop deployment, build-up of matériel, or the introduction of new military inventory or electronic warfare capacity, into the so-called Forward Area. And the Russians, in turn, were reasonably well-informed of NATO capabilities. Which meant, in practical terms, that nobody got trigger-happy because they couldn’t figure out what the other guys were up to. It was that practice, the use of intelligence as a deterrent, the knowing, that kept the Cold War from getting hot. It kept us from blowing each other up.

Ames, by contrast, was a cat’s paw in a different and dirtier game, the counterespionage wars. This isn’t about intelligence-gathering, it’s a sabotage campaign, rival security services manipulating each other, trying to undermine their confidence in their own perceived reality. It’s gaslighting, on an institutional scale. The objective is to make you second-guess every premise, every decision.

In the trade, this is called a deception. If you’re convinced there’s a traitor in your midst, you can trust no one. You look in every corner, and behind every door, and leave no stone unturned, but you can never be sure. This is the legacy of Kim Philby, of an Aldrich Ames or a Robert Hanssen. They’ve poisoned the well.