Circle of Treason (26 page)

Another failed avenue of investigation involved Rosario's father's will. It will be recalled that Diana Worthen had told us that Rosario did not appear to have any money except for her salary in 1983, when she was stationed in Mexico City. Yet, according to Rick, it was his wife's money that enabled him to lead a cushy lifestyle. We discussed this anomaly several times. One theory we developed was that perhaps Rosario's father had kept a tight grip on the family purse strings. When he died, which we knew had occurred at the end of 1983, Rosario's mother probably gained control of the family wealth and may have had more liberal views of sharing it with Rosario.

To test this theory, we needed to gain access to the father's will. Unfortunately, as we learned, wills in Colombia are not public documents and are not available in a central location. They are deposited with a notary. Bogota was believed to have more than two hundred notaries. We made a conscious decision not to follow this investigative trail any further. We reasoned as follows: Rosario's family, whatever its financial status, was prominent in Bogota and had a certain amount of name recognition. Further, an individual sometimes chooses a notary the way he chooses a lawyer. That is, one goes to a relative, a college friend, or someone else with whom he has at least a nodding acquaintance. If the news ever got back to Rosario's family—and subsequently to Rick—that we were trying to hunt down the will, it might totally sink our efforts. At this point, there was no warrant out for Rick's arrest. He had two valid passports. If he got wind of what we were doing, he would simply flee the United States for Colombia, and laugh at us from his comfortable condominium in Cartagena. Anyway, this is one of the points Congress freely criticized us about, but we would make the same decision today given the same choices.

One of the most fruitful, if lengthy and time-consuming, projects was that of interviewing a number of CIA employees who had been in key positions as of 1985. This project made the FBI somewhat nervous because the term “interview” means something specific to them as an investigative technique. To assuage their uneasiness, Jeanne and Sandy promised that, should any interviewee begin to make incriminating statements, they would immediately leave the room and the FBI could take over the conversation. What we had in mind, however, was merely to ask these people if they could help us in our research. We asked all the
interviewees the same questions, covering such mundane things as: Who picked up the sensitive Restricted Handling cables from the front office each morning? Who had access to which safes? Could conversations be heard between cubicles? Were they aware of any security violations during the period?

We never tried to keep our investigation a secret. Indeed, we hoped that someone would come to us with helpful information. However, only two people did—Diana and a person who had pertinent information about one of the other people who could have been the mole. This latter individual turned out to be guilty of various forms of misbehavior that in a more tightly run Directorate of Operations would have led to his dismissal. He also had money beyond his salary, and owned at least three expensive cars. However, as far as we could determine, he was not a spy.

In the end, we interviewed some forty people. They included both persons about whom we had not the slightest suspicion, and people who were on one of our lists. Among those we interviewed was Rick Ames. It would have raised suspicions not to interview him because he had been in a key position in the 1983-85 period. Two things stood out about this interview. First, when Rick was asked about security violations, he mentioned that he had left his safe open one night. We already knew this because the violation was a matter of record in his security file. He pointed out that the safe in question had contained paper on many of the cases that had been compromised and the combinations for all the safes in his branch. It was normal for him to mention this event, because this was the sort of thing we were asking about. However, he brought up the subject again later in the interview, somewhat out of the blue. This caught Sandy and Jeanne's attention and they regarded it as overkill. He seemed to be hinting that perhaps some unidentified individual had gotten into the safe, and that that someone was the mole.

The second thing that stood out in this interview was Rick's reaction to the next-to-last question. We asked everyone: If you were going to betray CIA secrets to the KGB, how would you go about it? We also included subsidiary questions, such as: Would you identify yourself? Would you prefer a one-shot deal or a continuing relationship? Would you be deterred by the knowledge that you are subject to periodic polygraphs? While the main purpose of this series of questions was to get additional
ideas about possible scenarios, the secondary aim was to help educate our FBI colleagues as to how the mind of a CIA officer was likely to work.

Many of the people we posed our questions to were case officers, adept in role playing. They entered into what was to them a game, coming up with a variety of imaginative stratagems. One told us that he would go to a sub-Saharan capital he was familiar with. He said he knew the local service had an observation post across the street from the Soviet embassy, but they were only interested in identifying their own citizens who entered the embassy. Being Caucasian, he thought that he could enter the embassy and no one would think twice about it. Another officer told about how he had previously been stationed in the Far East and knew one of the local KGB officers from the diplomatic social circuit. This particular KGB representative had impressed our officer by seeming to be intelligent, open-minded, and not a drinker in the Soviet sense. Our officer knew that this Russian was again overseas and he thought that, given his favorable past impression, he would make his approach to him.

Both Sandy and Jeanne thought that Rick's response to the question was out of character. Rick can be quite articulate when engaged, and he can think on his feet. However, he hemmed and hawed, providing a somewhat hesitant and lukewarm response. In retrospect, he was melding some things he actually had done with others that he had not. To him, unlike to the others, this was more than a game. For instance, he said that he would make his approach overseas whereas in reality he had dealt directly with the Soviet embassy in Washington. On the other hand, he said that he would identify himself, and this is indeed what he had done. He further stated that he would not be deterred by the polygraph, and this turned out to be the case.

The last question we asked everyone was: What do you think happened in 1985? Some thought that there had been a human penetration of the CIA, some thought our problem had been technical, and others came up with various permutations and combinations. Rick, when asked for his opinion, mentioned Ed Howard, and then posed the rhetorical question: How long is the arm of coincidence?

At one point in this phase of the investigation, we became seriously sidetracked for a while. We received a report from an officer in one of our overseas stations that he had been in contact with a KGB officer, and that this KGB officer had told him that the KGB was running a mole inside the
CIA. As the story was told to us, the mole was an ethnic Russian who had served in Moscow. Based on this report, we began to concentrate on CIA employees who fit the parameters of this lead, although we did not completely discontinue examining information on those employees, such as Rick Ames, who did not. Eventually we discovered that there were major flaws in this story, and that it probably was a total fabrication.

During this same period we also received some misleading reporting from Sergey Papushin, the defector from the KGB's internal CI component, to the effect that this component was running a CIA officer who had been assigned to Moscow. In other words, there was some similarity between Papushin's statements and those recounted in the above statement. Unfortunately, Papushin had a severe alcohol problem, which shortly thereafter caused his death. We ultimately decided that his reporting could not be relied upon. We then started to refocus on our short list as originally compiled. However, we had lost valuable time.

AMES EMERGES AS A MAJOR FOCUS

I
T IS HARD TO ISOLATE A SPECIFIC TIME FRAME
when we became more and more focused on Ames. This was a gradual development. To the end, we never lost sight of the other individuals on our short list. However, as time passed Ames began to consume more of our daily attention. For easy reference, Dan Payne christened him with the informal cryptonym JOYRIDE, chosen because of the remark that Rick had made during his polygraph to the effect that his wife had money and he was getting a free ride.

A salient activity in our hard look at Ames was Sandy's creation of a chronology of his whereabouts and activities. This started as an informal reference, listing a few facts of Rick's career just for convenience. It ended up as a text-searchable word-processing document more than five hundred pages long, mind-numbing to compile and even more mind-numbing to read, but of high value to the investigation as it unfolded. Indeed it directly led to the major breakthrough in the case in August 1992.

The chronology included information from Ames' official Office of Security and Office of Personnel files plus other available material. The greatest volume of input came from an electronic search. It is possible to capture text from the CIA's electronic files going back many years. We asked that all these files be searched for Ames' true name and aliases, and that we receive the output in printed form. (Officers in the Directorate of Operations are assigned pseudonyms, always consisting of a first name,
middle initial, and last name, for use in Agency traffic. This system was originally developed so that employees would not know each other's identities, which added a degree of security to our operations. However, in practice most DO personnel know both the true name and pseudonym of their colleagues.)

We no longer remember how many thousands of documents resulted from this search, but Sandy had stacks and stacks of paper to wade through. The search produced not only pertinent and peripheral documents about Rick Ames, but also any communication naming any other Agency employee whose first, middle, or last name was Ames, any reference to Ames, Iowa, plus all mentions of the Ames Building, a complex in Roslyn, Virginia where the Agency had office space. In between other projects, Sandy spent months reading through this material and adding anything to her chronology that she thought might be useful.

Another large block of data that was added to the chronology consisted of Ames' badge ins and outs. Agency personnel are all issued plastic badges and have to insert them into a machine at building exits and entrances. For many years it has been possible to print out all the comings and goings of any employee. We got such a list from the Office of Security, and more months were spent by Sandy inputting Ames' exits and entrances. This produced a picture of Ames' daily habits. He rarely came to the office on time, he rarely stayed late, and even more rarely worked on a Saturday. Unfortunately for Sandy, he was a heavy smoker and during the later part of the period under review employees were not allowed to smoke in the building. Therefore many of the exits and entrances in Sandy's rundown were nothing more than cigarette breaks.

As it happened, however, one part of Ames' pattern turned out to be of great importance to the FBI after they took over the investigation. It was obvious that Ames was not a morning person and usually did not show up at the office on time. This pattern was occasionally broken and Ames would show up at perhaps 0730. When the FBI was trying to ascertain on which days Ames had had indirect contact with his KGB handlers, by loading or unloading a dead drop or by making or observing a signal, they eventually deduced that he did so early in the morning. There was a correlation between Ames' early arrivals and his operational activities as detailed in the CIA's chronology.

When Sandy went through Ames' personnel file early in her project, she found references in his 1984-85 annual evaluation (called a PAR, or Performance Appraisal Report) to a sanctioned contact he had with two Soviet diplomats in Washington, DC. This was not surprising because in those days it was common for SE Division officers assigned to headquarters to conduct assessments of local Soviet officials. This was done under the watchful eye of the FBI, which simply did not have the manpower to cover everyone at the Soviet embassy and ancillary offices. The FBI therefore allowed, and sometimes encouraged, CIA officers, usually in alias and with a fictional persona, to fill the gap by building up social relationships with these targets. As is normally the case, for legitimate security reasons the PAR was not very specific.

When Sandy started processing the electronic search of official traffic, she was able to fill in some of the particulars and, of key importance, to identify the two Soviets with whom Ames had been in contact. Their names were Sergey Ivanovich Divilkovskiy, a press counselor at the embassy, and Sergey Dmitriyevich Chuvakhin, an arms control specialist. Considerable details, some of which were quite startling, emerged when Sandy pulled their operational files. (It should be remembered that most of what was in these files was derived from Ames' reporting, and is not necessarily accurate or complete. In a later chapter, we will outline what really happened between Ames and the Soviets, as opposed to what we learned from the files.) The FBI suspected Divilkovskiy of being affiliated with the KGB. Further, some vulnerabilities had surfaced in his family life. Therefore, he was of interest to the FBI as a possible recruitment target or as a CI threat to be countered.