Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (26 page)

So it was that Grimes and Vertefeuille asked me about Aldrich Ames: Did I think he could be a spy for the Soviets? I immediately flashed back to my strange confrontation with him years earlier in Rome, over ignoring my instructions about readministering a polygraph test to the Eastern European walk-in code-named Motorboat once he had shown deception on the first test. The look of resentment and defiance I saw in Ames’s eyes when I challenged him about this had left a lasting impression.

“Yes,” I said, “and he is the only employee I know I would say that about.”

While the White House had been fully briefed on the top secret mole hunt, the president remained publicly preoccupied with the situation in Haiti. A mini-controversy erupted in October 1993 when one of the Agency’s top analysts described ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in highly critical terms in a closed-door, classified briefing before the House Intelligence Committee. This briefing was followed by others, including one in the Senate that had been requested by Senator Jesse Helms, the conservative North Carolina Republican who opposed intervention in Haiti. To some in the Clinton White House, this appeared to be a case of the CIA siding with the president’s conservative opponents and playing games with intelligence. But actually it was the opposite. The CIA was not against intervention in Haiti or reinstalling a democratically elected president, if that was what the White House desired. Rather, we wanted to make sure the president and members of Congress had the clearest picture possible. James Woolsey, the director at the time, agreed with the Agency assessment, which represented a consensus across the intelligence community. But his stance made it difficult in the beginning for us to gain the trust of the White House.

At the time, I could not allow myself to get too caught up in the controversy du jour because there was always so much else going on. The Clinton administration’s human rights focus in Haiti remained a top political priority in Washington, but in Latin America our number one operational priority remained the hunt for Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín drug cartel. I made this abundantly clear to Jay Brant, a CIA officer who was in Bogotá at the time. Escobar had become more than just a drug trafficker. By then he was a real political problem, one that symbolized the drug war. Brant remembers my marching orders: “We have to get Pablo. We need to show real progress here. Put everything you have into it,” he said I told him.
7
Brant knew that the relationship with the Colombian authorities was essential in the hunt for Escobar. He knew that a decision by them to put Escobar’s wife and children in protective custody would help as a lure. “We were constantly looking for ways to flush him out, and this strategy was what ultimately worked, because we were able to find a way to cause Escobar to reach out more frequently to his family, especially his son, who he adored,” Brant said.

The hunt finally ended on December 2, 1993, when a special technical surveillance unit of the Colombian police known as Search Bloc, commanded by then colonel Hugo Martínez, intercepted a cell phone call Escobar made to his son, Juan Pablo. Escobar was hiding out at a safe house in the Los Olivos neighborhood of Medellín. Police units immediately surrounded the house. Escobar and his bodyguard attempted to escape over the rooftops, but both were shot and killed.

However, that success was not long-lasting, since in the end the ever-present demand for cocaine resulted in a more decentralized network run by lower-level leaders who were able to keep the flow of drugs heading north. Jerry Komisar, as CNC director, noted that in many ways the Agency’s successes against drug kingpins such as Escobar seemed to only make the job more difficult. Komisar has said, “We would take down a dragon but be left with a lot of little snakes,” he said.
8
Despite our best efforts, innovative developments in using intelligence for tactical purposes, and such big successes as bringing down Pablo Escobar and breaking up the Cali Cartel, many of us knew right from the start that we were never going to fully accomplish the objectives of the program as set out by the policy makers. As long as there is a highly profitable demand for drugs, there will always be some enterprising group around the world that will find a way to meet that demand. The CIA deputy director Dick Kerr wisely commented that the drug business is the type of crime that will always be with us; the best we can do is “to keep beating it with a stick” to make it painful for the traffickers to engage in the business and, to the degree possible, make it harder and more costly for them to deliver the drugs. There has been some decrease in drug use in the United States in recent years, but it remains a multibillion-dollar business. The ambassador and former assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs Bob Gelbard said that on the supply side of the problem, one of our biggest mistakes is in thinking it is within the U.S. government’s purview to interdict, convict, and eviscerate the scourge of drugs in the region, when really it is up to the foreign governments to take advantage of the tools and skills we share with them and develop the democratic institutions and system of justice necessary to deal with the illegal organizations profiting from the drug business.
9
Echoing Kerr, Komisar said it is frustrating to look back and see that, despite the successes, we did not eliminate the drug problem.
10
Indeed, many of us who worked against the narcotics threat over the years would agree. But good liaison cooperation with host governments and assets we can trust, a linear strategy that coordinates agencies and capabilities across the U.S. government, and, most important, increased demand-reduction efforts at home is perhaps the best formula for countering or at least containing a serious transnational threat such as narcotics.

Two months after Escobar was killed, the CIA’s mole hunt came to an end that was even more dramatic. On February 21, 1994, Aldrich Hazen Ames, the man I had first met and come to know well in our training days, was pulled over near his home in Arlington, Virginia, by FBI agents as he drove his 1992 Jaguar to CIA headquarters. They had been trailing him and listening to his calls for months. There was some suspicion earlier that Ames and his wife were spending far more money than Ames made as a case officer, but it was assumed that was because Rosario came from a wealthy Colombian family. The real break in the case came after Grimes matched the dates Ames had reported meeting with a Soviet diplomat he was supposedly trying to recruit with the dates on which large deposits were made into one of his domestic bank accounts. According to Grimes, in an April 20, 2013, talk she gave at the National Archives, in 1993 an additional piece of information became available that pointed in Ames’s direction, and lead the FBI to open a full-scale investigation on him. It is believed by many in intelligence circles that the information came from a source who said that the mole we were looking for had served in Rome. This narrowed down the list pretty quickly, and the FBI opened an investigation into Ames. I saw his arrest on television, and even though I’d had an inkling this was in the cards, it was a shocker. I found it particularly depressing because I knew him personally. His arrest led to one of the lowest morale moments in the history of the CIA.

What could possibly have led Ames to commit the ultimate betrayal of country, friends, and family? The question troubles me to this day. Paul Redmond, the head of the counterintelligence team that finally identified Ames, said that “it always boils down to money in the end.” Ames, who was in some financial distress when he brazenly walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington back in 1985, admitted as much. In a number of interviews, he said his motivation was money. I suspect the picture was much more complicated than that. While Ames was intellectually smart, he had relatively poor people skills and was fundamentally lazy. As a result, he turned out to be a spotty performer as a case officer, but nevertheless had a highly inflated, if not grandiose, sense of his own capabilities, intellect, and importance. Dr. Kerry Sulkowicz is an insightful psychiatrist and founder of the business psychology firm the Boswell Group. We’ve discussed Ames, and he believes that Rick had very little insight into his own motivations. Sulkowicz surmises that the money Ames received from the Russians was a much-needed validation of his importance and self-worth. It was also a necessity for keeping Rosario happy. Joe Wippl, an experienced Europe operative, gained keen insight into Ames’s motivation as the senior representative from the Directorate of Operations on the damage assessment team that studied Ames’s betrayal. In transcripts of FBI wiretaps, Rosario repeatedly berates Ames about his competence and time and again grills him about the details of his encounters with the Soviets. Wippl pointed out that while Rosario’s extended family was wealthy, her immediate family had limited financial means. Money was a symbol not only for Ames but also for Rosario. It is Sandy Grimes’s belief that Ames would not have been a traitor if it hadn’t been for Rosario.

Except for a brief moment after the Soviets had arrested the agents he betrayed, Ames continued to believe, right up to the end, that the Agency could never catch him—that he had outsmarted the system. At the same time, I do not doubt he believed he was gaming the Russians. According to Sulkowicz, this points to his narcissism—with low self-regard and the need for constant validation. Ames needed to boost his depleted sense of self-worth by turning himself into the opposite: a grandiose figure. “He built up this grand façade, but in fact he was nothing,” Sulkowicz said. In thinking about Ames’s motivation, it is also interesting to consider his apparently difficult childhood and his conflicted relationship with his father. Sulkowicz speculates that on some level the Agency was a stand-in for his father, and his desire to tear down this elite institution that he was admittedly proud to be a part of cannot be separated from his ambivalence toward his father, who was also an Agency underachiever. This analysis makes sense to me. But one thing is clear: Ames had a capacity for compartmentalizing, so he would not have to consider the consequences of his actions—what he called “file and forget.” Only he knows whether signing the Soviet agents’ death warrants haunts his nights at the high-security U.S. penitentiary near Allenwood, Pennsylvania, where he will spend the rest of his life. I doubt it.

*   *   *

By the time Director Woolsey embarked, midsummer, on a broad internal review of intelligence collection and analysis at the CIA in the aftermath of the Ames case, U.S. forces were practicing for their planned invasion of Haiti. The Clinton administration had been frustrated for months in its efforts to oust the Haitian military and restore Aristide as the country’s democratically elected leader. But time, and international patience, were running out for Haiti’s military rulers at the end of July. The UN Security Council unanimously authorized the use of force against the Haitian junta.

Prior to military intervention, I was asked by the White House to go to Port-au-Prince to meet with Lieutenant Colonel Michel François, the head of Haiti’s secret police, and tell him to get out of town or the U.S. government would be visiting him in full force. Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security adviser, and Lake’s deputy, Sandy Berger, liked to manage events carefully and wanted to prepare a script for the meeting. We spent a great deal of time going over a very detailed script, which was rather overdone. A meeting like this cannot be scripted line by line. Only the main message can be fully developed by committee. After that, normal human interactions play out. Flexibility and maneuverability are necessary in the real world. There was just too much give-and-take in this type of tough meeting. It was essential to develop a rapport before jumping to an ultimatum. In the end, I delivered the clear message the White House wanted, but took the time I needed to set the stage. I have always believed that Lake and Berger liked the fact that I was the one undertaking the task, because they thought, at six foot five, I could project a frightening presence, despite my friendly self-image, which I now recognize may not have been universally shared.

François was fearful of the meeting. We had clandestine reporting that he had gone to his witch doctor beforehand to fend off “the evil spirit from the north.” Apparently, the witch doctor doused him in white powder as an antidote. It is rather amazing that he was frightened, since it was his country, and he controlled the secret police. In reality, I probably should have been concerned for my own well-being. During the meeting, François refused to eat or drink, perhaps thinking he might be drugged or poisoned. I told him a story that I was once told by a senior Latin American official in another country that addressed the issue of machismo, which I thought was apropos of this situation. Needless to say, this was not part of the script. I told François what the official told me: in a crisis, “we [Latin Americans] are like roosters on a railroad track, and the United States is the train. While we should get off the track, the roosters puff out their chests and stand pat.” I suggested he did not want to play the role of the rooster. He did not accept my advice or financial offer to leave town right away, but he was gone by October. Sometime after that, François reported to the media from exile that an Agency official had threatened to kill him and his family if he did not leave Haiti, which of course was far from true. I did deliver a heavy message, for sure, but he allegedly interpreted it as a physical threat—or tried to score political points by publicly spinning it that way.

Kambourian and other CIA officers with long years in the Latin America Division agree that the Haiti operation was a successful one that met the president’s objectives. It was a success because of the coordination between the Agency and the military. It was also a success in that no American lives were lost in the operation. After Clinton told the American people, in a nationally televised address on September 15, that the United States was prepared to use military force to oust Haiti’s military rulers, I tracked developments from our headquarters command center on a daily basis. I was impressed by the way former president Jimmy Carter, at Clinton’s behest, had traveled to Haiti and pushed relentlessly for a settlement. He would not give up, even after Washington started urging him to cut off the talks because the Haitian military seemed to be standing its ground. Carter supposedly received a White House directive to leave the table because the invasion would be launched soon. He ignored this and went on jawboning the military. About that time, our attack aircraft started to take off from Miami. The Haitians likely had plane watchers in Florida, and they reported this quickly to the Haitian high command, which immediately yielded to our demands, and our aircraft were called back. It was a gutsy move by Carter and Clinton. Kambourian informed the U.S. military high command that the Haitians would not resist. U.S. forces started landing in Haiti the following day. Aristide returned a little over three weeks later, on October 15, 1994.