by Jack Devine
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.
Back at headquarters, at the height of tensions prior to the troops’ landing in Haiti, Woolsey announced that he had reprimanded eleven current and former Agency officials for failing to discipline Aldrich Ames during his lackluster, alcoholic career or not moving more aggressively once it was discerned that a mole was loose inside the Agency. He noted “a systemic failure of the C.I.A.—and most significantly, of the Directorate of Operations—a failure in management accountability, in judgment, in vigilance.”11 I went to the auditorium at headquarters to hea
r Woolsey announce the reprimands of my colleagues and explain his reasoning for them. The place was packed, and the atmosphere was thick with tension. I stood at the back. Most of those in the audience were expecting Woolsey to come down much harder and announce a spate of firings. But they’d clearly misjudged the man. He had approached the task like the lawyer he is. He reviewed the evidence carefully and realized that there indeed had been a series of small misdeeds by a number of people, rather than major mistakes by a few. I sensed that most of those on hand were not satisfied. They surprisingly seemed to want harsher penalties for their own colleagues, largely because of the pain and humiliation the Agency had suffered. This view was shared by Congress and the White House. Washington needed a scalp, someone to take the fall, even though there was not one villain whose failures had led directly to the fiasco. I’m not sure Woolsey understood this at the time, and he received no credit for his measured approach.
The CIA’s inspector general identified twenty-three senior managers who in his view were accountable for Ames’s betrayals. Not long after Woolsey announced the reprimands, Frank Anderson, my successor as head of the Afghan Task Force, with associate deputy director of operations John McGaffin’s concurrence, headed off to Europe to give Milt Bearden, my close partner during the covert war in Afghanistan, a career achievement award. Bearden was among the eleven who had received reprimands. I did not know anything about this unauthorized award ceremony. But when Woolsey found out what Anderson and McGaffin had done, he immediately removed them from their positions, thinking it was an act of defiance on their part. They resigned instead of accepting their demotions.
McGaffin’s departure created a vacancy in the second-most-powerful position in the Directorate of Operations, that of the associate deputy director of operations. Certainly I was interested in the position, but I would rather have ascended to the directorate’s upper ranks under happier circumstances. The Ames case had shattered confidence in the Agency and crushed morale. The Clinton administration was downsizing and remained, at best, ambivalent about the value of the Agency, despite all the good counternarcotics work we had done in Latin America and our success in Haiti, where Aristide was back in power. Still, I had had my eye on the seventh floor since the day I joined the Agency, and I felt ready to take on a new challenge.
ELEVEN
Raising the Bar
Washington, 1994–95
A few days after Anderson and McGaffin resigned, I was surprised to receive in my office mail a formal letter from Woolsey saying I was a candidate for McGaffin’s job and would be interviewed soon. In the past, the director of central intelligence would simply have conferred with his deputy director of operations and selected someone. This time, Woolsey and his deputy DCI, Admiral William O. Studeman, wanted a clear say in the decision. There reportedly were three of us in the running: one senior officer from the Far East and another from the Africa Division, where Somalia was a hot issue. I knew the competition would be intense. The interview took place around the conference table in Woolsey’s office, with just me, Woolsey, and Studeman in the room, and lasted for half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes. It went by quickly. They began with a single, basic question: How would I propose handling the job? I took it and ran with it, setting forth an agenda for change inside the directorate that I had carefully thought through ahead of time. I told them I wanted to increase the emphasis on centers, bringing operators and analysts closer together, as we had done so effectively in the Counter Narcotics Center and the Afghan Task Force. We need to change our “tooth-to-tail” ratio, trimming staff in favor of more operators in the stations. We needed stricter accountability for our operational responsibilities. We needed more emphasis on counterterrorism, and we needed to push hard to upgrade the directorate’s technological capabilities. I thought my enthusiasm came across and helped me win points. It was hard to judge how I had done, but I felt I had handled myself reasonably well, and when I left the room I remained confident that I was still in the running.
I received a call a few days later from Ted Price, the deputy director of operations, who told me the job was mine. He called a senior staff meeting that afternoon in his office to make the announcement. I called Pat to give her the good news and then advised my deputy in the Latin America Division, Marty Roeber. But I did not mention it to anyone else. I did not want it out on the street before the official announcement from Price’s office. When Ted made the announcement to the division and station chiefs that he and Woolsey had selected me for the job, it came as a mild surprise to some, especially the other contenders. I enjoyed the moment, but like many moments in my life, I did not linger long on the good news and the shot of adrenaline that came with it. I moved on quickly, concentrating on how I would handle the job.
The news flew through the directorate instantly. Everyone in the Latin America Division was already aware of the development before I got back to my office. Price sent out a brief cable to all our field stations alerting them of my assignment as ADDO. Without fanfare, I took over my new office the next day and attended the directorate’s weekly staff meeting. I sat down in the ADDO’s chair at the table. I felt at home. The high-rolling clandestine chess match had begun.
As a psychological side benefit, I had a prestigious key to the director’s exclusive elevator, an office on the vaunted seventh floor, and a parking space in an elite executive lot in the basement, small symbols of success. It was a long walk from West Parking Lot, where I parked the first day I arrived at Langley so many years earlier. The executive parking area had a limited number of spots: for the DCI and the DDCI, the DDO and the ADDO, the DDI and the ADDI, the inspector general, the general counsel, and the executive director. DDO Ted Price drove a Porsche; IG Fred Hitz, a Lexus; executive director Nora Slatkin, a Cadillac convertible. I drove a bright canary-yellow Ford Festiva with stick shift and no air-conditioning. Hardly James Bond! Fortunately, my spot was adjacent to that of ADDI Dave Cohen, who drove a world-class junker that leaked oil profusely.
The atmosphere on the seventh floor was unlike anything I have experienced, before or since. The pace was relentless. The days were filled with back-to-back meetings and an onslaught of operational and personnel decisions that needed to be made nearly instantly. It was simultaneously exhilarating and frustrating, an addictive challenge to see how far I could push myself. But there was never as much time to be as thorough as we wanted. It was tough to maintain control over the day. All too often I was scheduled to do a project or meet people, and a fire would ignite over a flap that was in the press, or something would come in from the field, or someone would need immediate consultation. We wanted to be sure we saw to all our priorities, but there were always loose ends, because we never had enough time. The results were never perfect, and we often had to hope that what we put together did not unravel due to one errant thread.1
But I believed in my ability to handle any contingency. By that point in my career, I had recruited agents, run stations, orchestrated a covert war, directed an interdisciplinary center, and led a division. I’d even run a black bag job in the Mediterranean Basin, a singular moment in command when I reinforced, under intense pressure, that I could indeed pull the trigger.
We were breaking into a government building to steal a set of highly sensitive documents, a foreign nation’s crown jewels. We couldn’t leave fingerprints, and things had to run like clockwork, because this was the only night of the year we could go. If we didn’t do it that night, we would be out of business for a year. We had inside information telling us where the security cameras were and how the alarms worked, but the trickiest part of all was keeping tabs on more than a dozen foreign officials with access to the target area who could, theoretically, show up in the middle of the operation. We needed to know where all of them were when we went in at precisely 11:30 p.m. It was now 11:00, and we had them all under surveillance. So far, everything had gone according to plan. The insertion team from headquarters and all the extra surveillance teams, in
cluding some of our wives, had assembled with their fake documents and elaborate cover stories. They’d all been training together for weeks. It got down to every team member knowing exactly what he needed to do, including carrying a bag of coins so he could use a pay phone if his secure phone didn’t work. This was one of the most sensitive things we did in the Agency. And the people who executed the break-ins in many ways engaged in the most professional part of tradecraft. If it went well, we would get a pat on the back, and no one would know about it other than a small group of people. But if it went badly, it would be a long road back for me. Inevitably, someone would come in and show how I hadn’t taken proper precautions. The political and personal risks associated with this kind of operation were huge. If we were caught in the act, it could lead to the arrest of our entry team and create a political firestorm that could embarrass the highest levels of the U.S. government.
