Criminal Masterminds

by Anne Williams

  The CIA were highly impressed with the way Ames had handled the Orogodnik case. He was sent to New York City, which was considered to be part of a major spy network because it was home to the United Nations. Here, Ames was assigned to a nuclear arms expert by the name of Sergey Fedorenko, whose code name was Pyrrhic. Before Fedorenko was called back to Russia, Ames claimed that he had managed to obtain vital missile information off him and that the two men had become very close friends.

  In 1978, Ames was given a third assignment – to get close to Ambassador Nikolaevich Shevchenko, who had been secretly spying for the USA for over two years. Ames helped to protect Shevchenko from the KGB and had to comfort him when his wife mysteriously committed suicide.

  With several successful missions under his belt, Ames was now at the top of his game. However, his personal life was now a mess and he grew further and further apart from his wife, Nancy. He started going on drinking binges and it was not surprising that when it came to the time for promotion within the CIA, Ames was passed over. He became bitter and many of his associates at the CIA said they were concerned about his growing bitterness and aggression.

  Shortly after his divorce from Nancy, Ames’s financial situation took a nosedive. He started to fantasise about ways to earn large amounts of money and before long his bank account swelled with money being deposited on a regular basis, in a way that he could not admit to any of his colleagues.

  co-conspirator

  Ames married Maria del Rosario Casa Depuy one hot afternoon in August 1985. She was the cultural attaché for the Colombian Embassy in Mexico and was introduced to Ames by one of his associates at the CIA. Their relationship, which was clandestine at first, was frowned upon by the CIA. Agents are not supposed to have affairs with or marry foreign national, yet Ames was seemingly successful on both counts.

  However, the marriage between Ames and Depuy was nothing compared to the secret they held, which would eventually become too large to hide. When Ames was trying to think of ways of earning cash, he remembered that the KGB had once offered one of his CIA subordinates $50,000 to spy for them.

  Over the period of the next nine years, Ames, with his considerable knowledge of Soviet operations and experience in clandestine missions, he succeeded in obtaining a vast amount of money from the KGB without being detected by either the CIA or FBI. Using his counter-intelligence job within the CIA to obtain access to active cases, Ames contacted selected Soviet officials, using an assumed name and fake job description. He identified himself as a Soviet Union expert with the Intelligence Community Staff and, using this cover, he met with one particular Soviet official for almost a year. Ames allegedly sold the KGB the names of Soviet agents who had been recruited by the CIA, as well as many valuable secrets about US spies working against the Soviet Union. During these years Ames and his wife made numerous large cash deposits into two Virginia banks in the USA and abroad. All the money was allegedly paid by the Soviet Union in exchange for national security secrets. Using this information the KGB started rounding up the CIA’s secret spies, beginning with two men: Motorin and Martynov. They were both brutally interrogated in Moscow and eventually executed.

  In July 1986, Ames was transferred to Rome in Italy, where he continued his meetings with the KGB. When his assignment in Rome was complete, Ames returned to Washington DC, where he continued to pass classified documents to the KGB using predetermined hiding places. Ames would leave his documents in the ‘dead drop’, which would be replaced by an envelope containing money. Eventually his clandestine operations netted him over $1.8 billion.

  money arouses suspicion

  By 1993, the CIA and the FBI were suspicious about the Ames’s new-found wealth. The FBI opened an investigation in May 1993, and they carried out intensive surveillance of both Ames and his wife for the next ten months. When the FBI searched the Ames’s residence, they found documents and other information which linked them to the KGB. They went through his rubbish and found a computer printer ribbon which showed that Ames had written several long letters to the Russians. The key piece of information, and a major blunder on the part of Ames, was the fact that he had recently updated his word processing programme on his computer. What he had failed to realise was that the programme automatically made copies of any documents that he typed, giving the FBI details of his counter-espionage activities.

  On October 13, 1993, agents watching Ames saw him put a chalk mark on a mailbox, indicating that he intended to meet with KGB members in Bogota, Colombia. Ames was tailed and was seen speaking to his Russian contact in Bogota. When Ames applied for a trip to Moscow as part of his official CIA duties, the FBI decided to take action. Scared that Ames might try and bolt, on February 21, 1994, he was lured from his house on the pretext that he was urgently needed at the office. As he got into his Jaguar to leave, his car was surrounded by FBI officers. Inside the house, his wife was also arrested, surrounded by evidence of her obvious gluttony. Row upon row of priceless dresses, shoes, jewellery and lingerie, some of which hadn’t even been removed from their boxes.

  Ames, now 52, and his wife, 41, were arrested in Arlington, Virginia, and both were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. Ames offered to confess if the government would release his wife, but the Justice Department refused to bargain with him. Little did Ames know, that in another room Rosario was turning against her husband, stating that she had simply got caught up in his lies, deceit and manipulation.

  Ames was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment while Rosario received five years. As soon as her parole came up in 1999, she was deported to Colombia, where she still lives today.

  The case of Aldrich Ames is considered to be the worst betrayal of intelligence in the history of the USA. No one has really ever assessed the true extent of the damage, but it is obvious that Ames knew all the true names of virtually every Soviet agent being recruited by the CIA. There is no doubt that Ames was a ‘super’ criminal mastermind who sent shockwaves through the US intelligence community, causing the deaths of at least ten US agents.

  A man who never made any attempt at hiding his love of excesses, Ames eventually expressed bitter regret at what he had done, saying:

  No punishment by this court can balance or ease the profound shame and guilt I bear.

  Klaus Fuchs

  Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs was a scientist who was responsible for many of the theoretical calculations relating to early models of the hydrogen bomb. Through a series of blunders he was allowed to provide British and US nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union which turned out to be of major significance.

  Klaus Fuchs was born on December 29, 1911, in Rüsselsheim, Germany. His father was a Lutheran minister who was deeply committed to socialist ideology. He taught his son to stand up for what he believed, even if his beliefs were at odds with accepted codes of ethic.

  Fuchs came to the UK in 1933 as a communist refugee. As a student at both Leipzig and Kiel Universities, Fuchs became active in politics and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 1932, he became a member of the Communist Party, but after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, his political affiliations made him a target for the Nazis. Fuchs was forced into hiding and managed to flee to France. From there, using family connections, he managed to escape to Bristol, England. As a German refugee, Fuchs was entitled to aid, including a scholarship to Bristol University. By 1937, he had graduated from Bristol with a doctorate in Physics and continued his education with advanced Physics at Edinburgh University. His paper on quantum mechanics entitled Proceedings of the Royal Society gained him a teaching position at Edinburgh, until the outbreak of war in 1939.

  By 1940, the war in Europe had escalated and the UK began to fear for its national security. Any Germans living in the UK were taken into custody and put into internment camps. Fuchs was first taken to the Isle of Man but was later transferred to Quebec in Canada, where he stayed from June to December 1940. However, Professor Max Born, who Fuchs had studied under at Edi
nburgh, intervened and managed to obtain special treatment for the talented, young physicist.

  By early 1941, Fuchs had temporarily returned to Edinburgh. Within months, Fuchs was approached by Rudolf Peierls of the University of Birmingham to work on the British ‘Tube Alloys’ programme – the British atomic bomb research project. Despite wartime restrictions, Fuchs was granted British citizenship in 1942 and was asked to sign the Official Secrets Act. It was around this time that Fuchs contacted a former friend in the German Communist Party, who put him in touch with a man at the Soviet Embassy in the UK, whose code name was ‘Rest’.

  passing over secrets

  In 1943, Fuchs was transferred, along with Rudolf Peierls, to the Columbia University in New York City. It was here that Fuchs began work on the Manhattan Project, which was the US atomic bomb programme. In August 1944, Fuchs’ work took him to the Los Alamos, New Mexico, research facility, where he was seen as a first-rate scientist and researcher. His colleages later remarked that he was a serious man who focused with great intensity on his work. No one suspected that Fuchs had in fact been passing detailed information regarding the bomb project to a Soviet connection called Harry Gold, code name ‘Raymond’. Fuchs made contact with Gold almost as soon as he arrived in the USA, and at one of their meetings in Santa Fe he gave his contact a precise drawing with measurements of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb. This was the bomb that the USA eventually dropped on Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

  When the war ended, Fuchs knew everything there was to know about making hydrogen bombs. In April 1946, he attended a three-day, top secret conference at Los Alamos, which outlined the details of work on the new ‘super bomb’.

  When Fuchs was asked to return to the UK to continue his work, he made sure he read every document in the Los Alamos archives on thermo-nuclear weapon designs. Once back in the UK, Fuchs started work at the Harwell Atomic Research facility. However, it wasn’t long before he had re-established contact with his Soviet friends.

  In 1947, Fuchs met his new contact, Alexander Feklisov, in a pub in north London. Feklisov primed him for details of the new super bomb, and Fuchs described in detail certain structural characteristics of the new weapon. They met for a second time in March 1948, and this time Fuchs handed over specific information that some Russian physicists now say proved to be of great importance to the Soviet hydrogen bomb.

  Fuchs’ world of espionage started to crumble at the end of 1949. In 1948, the Venona cables were starting to be deciphered. The Venona Project was a top-secret US effort to gather and decrypt messages sent in the 1940s by agents of what is now called the KGB and the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. These cables revealed the identities of numerous Americans who were spying for the Soviet Union, including Klaus Fuchs.

  One of these cables was a report on the progress of the atomic bomb research, which had been written by Fuchs. At first it was not obvious whether Fuchs had in fact written the report for the Soviets, or whether they had obtained it by other means. Whatever the truth, it was definite proof that the Russians had penetrated the secret of the Manhattan Project.

  On December 21, 1949, a British intelligence officer told Fuchs that he was suspected of having given away classified information on nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. Although Fuchs repeatedly denied the accusations, he eventually broke down under interrogation and agreed to make a statement. He confessed to his part in the theft of atomic secrets and his trial took place at the Old Bailey in London on March 1, 1950. The court was packed, with over eighty reporters, two US Embassy representatives, the mayor of London and the Duchess of Kent. The chief prosecutor was attorney General Hartley Shawcross, who had made a name for himself at the famous Nuremberg Trials.

  The trial only lasted for two hours after Fuchs pleaded guilty, and he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison, which was the maximum possible punishment under British law for the passing of military secrets to a friendly nation. When Fuchs was passing his secrets, the USSR was not an enemy.

  Fuchs only served nine years of his sentence, after which he was allowed to leave the UK to relocate in East Germany. He resumed his scientific career and lectured on his beloved Physics. In 1959, he married a friend of his from his years as a student, Margarete Keilson. Fuchs was elected to the Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party central committee, and he was later appointed as deputy director for the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf. He eventually retired in 1979 and died on January 28, 1988.

  Whether the information Fuchs passed on regarding neclear weapons was useful is still a matter of debate. Many believe that by the time Fuchs left the project in 1946, too little information was known about the workings of the hydrogen bomb to be deemed of any use. British security were highly criticised after the trial of Fuchs for failing to make appropriate checks on a man who never denied having communist connections.

  Ten months after Fuchs was jailed, another Harwell scientist, Professor Bruno Pontecorvo, went missing, and it was later discovered that he had fled to Russia.

  The Cambridge Spies

  In the 1930s, a number of bright young students at Cambridge University, who were destined for careers in the Foreign Office or the intelligence agencies, became famous for passing information to the Soviet Union over a period of about thirty years. In the KGB they were known as the ‘magnificent five’, but in the UK they were better known as the Cambridge spies. The four men were Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Mclean and Anthony Blunt. There was believed to be a fifth man, John Cairncross, but there is insufficient proof to confirm that he was actually involved. The information they passed on was accurate and reliable, and they became major assets to the KGB. None of the men were motivated by any form of financial gain, but by the fact that they believed capitalism to be corrupt.

  The Cambridge spies were informally led by Harold ‘Kim’ Philby, who allegedly served the KGB for over fifty years. He is believed to have caused the most damage to both British and US intelligence, providing classified information that caused the deaths of numerous agents. Burgess and Maclean were most productive for around twelve years, until they defected to Russia in 1951. Anthony Blunt was the most aristocratic of the infamous Cambridge spy ring. He was a discreet homosexual, a distant relative of the Queen and keeper of the royal family’s pictures and drawings.

  the beginning

  The story of the Cambridge spies really started during the time of the Great Depression. The world was plunged into an economic crisis after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. At colleges and universities, Socialist groups were beginning to make their presence known, and this included a group of young men at Cambridge University. Young people who had become fed up with capitalist ideals had gone to fight for Franco and the Nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War. Others, who wanted to see what Communism was like, went to the Soviet Union. The men mentioned above decided to take matters into their own hands to try and help the Socialist cause.

  ANTHONY BLUNT

  Anthony Blunt, the son of a London vicar, was the first of the four to enter Cambridge. He joined in 1926 to study the History of Art, and shortly afterwards he became a member of the Cambridge Apostles. This was an elite secret society, which was essentially a debating club that based its beliefs on those of Marxism.

  Blunt went to Russia in 1933, and it was probably while he was there that he was recruited by the NKVD, a branch of secret communist police. Although it is not certain, it is thought that Blunt recruited the other members of the Cambridge spies, especially targeting homosexuals. At a time when homosexuality was illegal, Blunt kept his affair with fellow student, Guy de Moncey Burgess, under wraps.

  When war broke out, Blunt was working as Deputy Director for the Courtauld Institute of Art. Although he volunteered to work in Military Intelligence, because of his links with communism, his application was rejected. Ironically, he was later given a job in MI5 on the recommendations of a friend. For the next five years he secretly sabotaged counter-espionage op
erations. He provided Moscow with the names of double agents within the KGB and also intercepted diplomatic documents and communications. Blunt worked closely with his lover, Guy, and they often met up to prepare their reports for the Kremlin.

  When the war finished, with the permission of Moscow, Blunt left MI5, but not the services of the KGB. Blunt effected the perfect cover by taking the job as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. He felt that no one would suspect him of running messages and collecting information while he was a member of the King’s staff.