Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (26 page)

The Agency scrambled to organize a memorial ceremony in tribute to our fallen colleagues. Former and current dignitaries from the U.S. Government and from foreign governments attended, coming from far and wide. One person was conspicuously absent, however. Bill Clinton, our new president, couldn’t find the time to make the ten-minute trip from the White House to the CIA to pay his respects. He sent his wife instead. It was an unforgivable slight from a man who had famously told the American people during his just-completed campaign, “I feel your pain.”

The atmosphere at the Agency had turned profoundly sad and dispirited in those early months of 1993. But, at least for me, it wasn’t just because of the lingering trauma from the CIA shootings, or because it was increasingly apparent that President Clinton couldn’t care less about the Agency or the rest of the intelligence community. What I first learned during that period, and what only a handful of people inside the building knew, was that there was a new disaster on the horizon, something that would shake the institution to its core: A longtime, murderous traitor was walking freely in the halls of Langley. And he was one of us.

Sometime in the winter of 1992–1993—I don’t remember the precise date—an officer from the CIA Counterintelligence Center came to see me in my office. The officer was part of a small, cloistered group of analysts that had been formed a few years earlier to try to solve a haunting mystery that dated back to the Casey era: Who or what was responsible for the relentless and unexplained disappearances and deaths of the U.S. Government’s most valuable human sources inside the Soviet Union?

The officer, a friend of long standing, came in and closed the door. In a quiet and grave voice, she led off with a volley of specific questions. How can the Agency go about getting lawful access to the records residing in
the Northwest Federal Credit Union, the in-house financial institution for current and former CIA employees and their families? Furthermore, the officer asked, who would have to know why we want them, or which records we want? How much would we have to put in writing?

I knew the officer well enough to know that she was not the alarmist, melodramatic type. I was caught flat-footed by her questions, but I stumbled my way through a reasonably accurate explanation of the laws on financial privacy, an area in which I was no expert. The officer nodded, but remained seated, like she expected me to ask my own questions. I took the opening.

“How serious is this?”

“We think we’ve found the reason our Soviet assets have been disappearing. Do you know an employee named Rick Ames?”

I knew Rick Ames only vaguely. He was the sort of bland, anonymous, mid-level functionary that populates any large federal bureaucracy, and the CIA, for all its legend and mystique, is at bottom a large federal bureaucracy. He and I had had a few interactions, and to the extent I gave any thought to him at all, he didn’t seem all that smart or all that dumb. In the weeks and months ahead, I would learn far more about him. Namely, that he was an irredeemable drunken lout who for years had been pocketing millions from the Soviets in return for reams of highly classified information. That his boorish and brazen behavior, his absurdly lavish lifestyle, had long been either tolerated or systematically overlooked by his various superiors. That he had the blood of at least nine CIA sources on his hands.

By early 1993, I had been in the Agency long enough to have witnessed more than my share of the CIA’s mistakes, missteps, and follies. But Rick Ames represented the ultimate nightmare—a turncoat imbedded for years in the ranks.

After that visit by the officer from the Counterintelligence Center, I was brought into the very small loop of people who were privy to the investigation. The loop had to be kept small. Rick Ames was still walking the halls, unaware of the noose tightening around his neck. Meanwhile, the FBI bugged his office, his home, his Jaguar sedan.

During the course of my long Agency career, it usually wasn’t very hard to keep a secret. It’s part of the compact you make when you enter the organization. You can’t tell secrets to your family, your friends, anyone
who doesn’t hold the necessary security clearances, and, even if someone has the clearances, you don’t unless they need to know a particular secret. It doesn’t matter how exciting the secret is (and there were thousands of that category I came to know), or how much you trust the person to whom you might tell the secret. You just don’t do it.

The secret about Rick Ames and his treachery was the most difficult one I ever had to keep. I had to do so for a year, until the day he was arrested outside his home, on his way to work, on February 4, 1994. (A handful of people who were in on the investigation from the beginning had to keep the secret even longer. The Ames case, like most espionage investigations, required several years of discreet, painstaking work before there was enough evidence to make an arrest.) The reason it was so hard was that after the day the Counterintelligence Center officer came to see me, after not having seen Rick Ames for years, I suddenly could not seem to avoid the SOB’s dull, clueless presence. I went to several meetings where Ames mysteriously and unaccountably appeared. I couldn’t bear to look at him, but I didn’t dare look away. On most of those occasions, the other Agency people attending knew nothing about the investigation, so it was easy for them to act as normal. Once in a while, however, there would be a meeting where Ames would be sitting there along with his boss at the time, the chief of the Counternarcotics Center. I knew that the chief knew about the investigation, and I knew that he also knew that I knew. A longtime officer in the clandestine service, he was well schooled in keeping up a false front, effortlessly engaging in friendly banter with me and the unsuspecting Ames. He seemed so much more at ease than I was about carrying on the charade.

And then there would be the times I would spot Ames chatting up other Agency employees in casual settings. His office was on the ground floor of what is referred to inside the CIA as the New Headquarters Office Building (NHB), a six-story structure erected in the late ’80s adjacent to the Original Headquarters Office Building (OHB). The two buildings are separated by a courtyard, and employees can go from one building to the other via a glassed-in walkway that looks out on the courtyard. In the months after I first learned about the Ames investigation, I would go through the walkway, on my way from one meeting to another, and frequently observe Ames standing in the courtyard, taking a cigarette break, and schmoozing with fellow employees who,
of course, had no idea they were talking to a Russian mole. What is he asking them? I would wonder to myself. What are they telling him? I remember one time in particular when I spotted Ames in the courtyard having an animated, one-on-one conversation with a guy who was in charge of one of the Agency’s most massive, successful, and sensitive technical intelligence-collection programs. It was an appalling thing to behold, and I felt an overwhelming urge to sprint into the courtyard and pull the guy away from Ames, to stop him from perhaps innocently mentioning something in passing—something significant—that Ames could pass back to his Russian handlers. But I was powerless to do anything but keep on walking.

My most excruciating moment of all came one day in January 1994 when I had a chance encounter with Ames on an NHB elevator. As fate would have it, I had just come from a briefing in the OHB in which the latest developments in the investigation were being discussed. I learned that his arrest was finally near and the apparent jaw-dropping extent of his treachery: the millions he had gotten from the Russians, the thousands of secrets he had likely passed to them over the previous decade, the deaths of Russian sources—at least nine, maybe more. My head was still spinning as I walked back to my office, which was located on the top floor of the NHB. As I arrived at the first-floor elevator, I was still trying to absorb the enormity of his betrayal. Standing there at the elevator, all by himself, was Rick Ames.

Still oblivious to everything, he grunted a perfunctory hello as we waited for the elevator to arrive. And waited—I didn’t think the damn thing would ever get there. As the seconds ticked by, he finally engaged me in some small talk. I have no recollection of what either of us said to each other; all I remember is that my heart was pounding so hard I thought my head was about to explode. Finally, mercifully, the elevator doors opened. The elevator was empty. Ames stepped in, but I didn’t. I couldn’t bear to spend another single second in his presence. I muttered something to him about forgetting something back in the OHB. As I turned away, and as the elevator doors closed, I stole one last glance at the most evil, destructive traitor in CIA history.

Ames was arrested a couple of weeks later. The ensuing public firestorm was predictable and devastating. The CIA was justly excoriated by Congress and ridiculed in the media for letting such an amoral,
drunken slacker as Rick Ames operate with impunity, and cause so much damage, for so long a period of time. The luckless Jim Woolsey, who had inherited a looming debacle he had nothing to do with, was attacked for allegedly not being tough enough in meting out punishment to those who had been in Ames’s chain of command during his decade of perfidy. True to form, Woolsey turned combative with his critics. His relations with Congress, already rancid, became toxic.

Meanwhile, the FBI was enjoying itself immensely. It took bows, at the Agency’s expense, for finally uncovering Ames, while subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—putting out the word that a traitor such as Ames could never exist in its ranks. (The Bureau’s smugness was premature. At the very moment of the Ames arrest, one of its own trusted veterans, Robert Hanssen, was freely selling secrets to the Russians that were at least as extensive and deadly as those passed by Ames. Hanssen would not be caught for another seven years.)

The Ames case was an unmitigated, humiliating disaster for the Agency’s reputation and standing. The fact that it deserved all of the opprobrium it got made the episode even more searing, and the damage more lasting.

The ’90s were going from bad to worse. And things would continue to go downhill. The heady days of the early ’80s, when the Agency was flush with money and full of power and influence, seemed a distant memory. But then, in a way, the ’80s returned. Only not in a good way.

In the aftermath of the Ames debacle, Jim Woolsey’s days at the CIA were numbered. That was apparent to everyone in the building, doubtless including Woolsey—a savvy realist. Perhaps he would have been more successful if he had served at a different time, under a different president. He relinquished his position as director at the end of 1994 in the same way he came to the job less than two years earlier—with little notice and no fanfare.

Given the Agency’s lowly status and battered reputation at the time, it was not surprising that there were few takers eager to become Woolsey’s successor. As the Clinton administration spent weeks casting around for candidates, that became embarrassingly obvious. Finally, John Deutch, the deputy secretary of defense, was announced as the nominee. Deutch, a brilliant scientist formerly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
was by all accounts—including his own—a very reluctant candidate. No one could blame him, I suppose, but for a demoralized organization, the last thing we needed to hear was that we had a new leader who had to be virtually shanghaied into the job.

At the time and in the years since, the common perception advanced in the media and by CIA alumni was that Deutch was extraordinarily unpopular within the ranks of career Agency personnel. That is undoubtedly true, but I may be one of the only exceptions. I came to greatly like and respect John Deutch. I found him to be a sympathetic, fascinating figure. He could come off as being arrogant, dismissive, and out of touch in large settings or with people he didn’t know, but among those he felt comfortable with, he was caring, witty, and unpretentious. At six feet three, he had an imposing physical presence with a somewhat imperious air, but at the same time had an endearing tendency in small groups to reach out and touch a person—man or woman—he was talking to, up to and including dispensing awkward hugs if he wanted to convey his congratulations or happiness about something.