by David Wise
In May 993, the FBI opened its case on Ames. It was directed by Robert M. “Bear” Bryant, the head of the Washington field office, and John Lewis, his deputy. Lewis chose Special Agent Leslie G. Wiser, Jr., to run the squad that placed Ames under surveillance. Both the case and Ames were code-named NIGHTMOVER. Nine months later, the FBI operation culminated in Ames’s arrest.
In the highest councils of the CIA and the FBI, however, the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994 brought only a fleeting sense of relief. As the damage assessment of the Ames case proceeded, it quickly became apparent that his actions—the betrayal of the CIA’s entire Soviet network—could not explain all of the puzzles still haunting the two agencies. There were a number of anomalies, as such unexplained events are known in the intelligence world, but the one that still loomed largest was the Felix Bloch case.
Somehow the KGB had been able to warn Bloch that he was in danger. And Aldrich Ames had not known about the FBI investigation of Bloch. He did not have access to the case. In the late spring of 1989, when someone had alerted the KGB to the FBI surveillance of Bloch, Ames was winding up a three-year tour in Rome. He did not return to the United States until July 20, 1989, a full month after the telephoned warning to Bloch.
Details are the essence of counterintelligence, and spycatchers must pay close attention to details if they are to prevail. The troublesome facts of the Bloch case could not be ignored.
After the arrest of Aldrich Ames, Senator Dennis DeConcini, the Arizona Democrat who was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, held closed hearings on the case and personally interviewed Ames at length in his jail cell. During the hearings, he said, the FBI made it clear “there has to be another.”
There were other anomalies besides the Bloch case. “There were a lot of things that Ames did not know about,” one CIA man recalled years later. “One of the things was the tunnel. And one or two other bureau technical collection systems that had clearly been compromised.”
One of these was an ingenious FBI operation code-named SPIDERWEB.* The bureau did not have the manpower to trail every Russian intelligence officer in Washington around the clock, but it devised a scheme to track them electronically. During the 1980s, the FBI managed to plant devices in the cars used by the Soviets.
The gadgets planted in the cars were neither microphones nor homing devices. SPIDERWEB was something new entirely. When a car driven by an intelligence officer passed certain fixed points around the Washington area, the bugs would transmit a signal, rather like the E-ZPass or similar devices that are common today and used by commuters to drive through tollbooths.
Sometime prior to 1991, SPIDERWEB crashed. “The devices stopped working,” said one FBI man. “We knew the operation was compromised because the Russians took all their cars into the garage and tore them apart. The bureau’s theory was they found one and pulled all the cars apart and found all of them. In reality, we now know they had been tipped off.”
In the 1980s, Jeanne Vertefeuille had not initially been given the resources she needed to run the CIA’s search for the penetration; as time passed, the agency seemed to have other priorities. It was Paul J. Redmond, a senior CIA counterintelligence officer, who was credited with reviving the mole hunt that in 1994 resulted in the FBI’s successful surveillance and arrest of Aldrich Ames. Within weeks of Ames’s capture, Redmond had set up a Special Investigations Unit (SIU) as a follow-on to the mole hunt unit.
In May 1994, President Clinton, reacting to the Ames case, reshuffled the government’s counterintelligence agencies. It had, after all, taken nine years for the CIA to catch up with Ames. Among other changes, Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directive 24, in an unprecedented action, required that an FBI agent head a Counterespionage Group (CEG) within the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center. It was not a popular move within the CIA, which thought it could do its own spy-catching.
And so, against the background of the Bloch mystery and the technical losses, the FBI and the CIA secretly launched a new mole hunt in 1994. To run it, in compliance with the Clinton directive, the FBI selected Ed Curran.
Then fifty, Curran had the right experience and background to try to discover the penetration. Tall, slim, and athletic, the father of four, he looked the part of an FBI man. He was a New York boy, born and raised in the Irish ghetto at 125th Street and Riverside Drive. His family moved to New Jersey, and Curran worked his way through college with his first FBI job, as a clerk in the Newark office. He got his degree in 1968 and became an FBI agent the same year. The bureau sent him to New York in 1972, and he began a full-time career as a counterspy. In the Soviet section at headquarters in the mid-1980s, he had worked on some of the most important cases—Pelton, Howard, and Yurchenko.
In August 1994, Curran came from the FBI to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and took over the Counterespionage Group (CEG). In that post, he also supervised the SIU, which was first located on the fourth floor of the new CIA headquarters building and then hidden undercover behind an unmarked door on the first floor of the adjoining older headquarters building. About seven CIA and three or four FBI specialists staffed the SIU. So secret was the mole hunt unit that very few of the 125 employees of the CIA’s Counterespionage Group knew what it was doing or even where it was. Only a handful of CIA people were allowed into the SIU office, although dozens of FBI agents had free access.
The agency and the bureau had historically mixed like oil and water. In part, this was due to their different missions. The CIA’s task was to collect intelligence; the FBI was ultimately a law-enforcement agency with responsibility for investigating crimes and arresting people, including spies. Conflicts were bound to arise.
“Whenever the CIA has a problem they circle the wagons,” said one FBI counterintelligence agent. “And it’s not just CIA. NSA had polygraphed a guy ten times, and he failed each time. A code clerk, he’d had sex with transvestites in Asian alleyways; his regular sex partner was a German shepherd. To wait as long as they did before calling in the FBI was outrageous. We never made a case against the code clerk.”
As the SIU began its work, there were inevitable clashes of cultures and personalities. Redmond, a Harvard man from Massachusetts who could swear in Serbo-Croatian—he had served in Yugoslavia for the CIA, as well as in the Near East—and Curran, the street-smart New Yorker, did not get along. But the bureaucratic infighting was largely the result of the presidential order putting the FBI onto the CIA’s turf.
The new mole hunt team got off to a rocky start. Only Diana Worthen, a midwesterner who had been Ames’s intelligence assistant in Mexico City, was a holdover from Jeanne Vertefeuille’s task force. She had good qualifications for the job—it was Worthen who was the first to raise the alarm about her old boss when she saw his affluent lifestyle and large house in Arlington, Virginia. But Worthen stayed with the new mole hunt unit less than two years.
Laine Bannerman, whose father had headed CIA security a generation earlier, was the first, albeit short-lived, head of the SIU. “She was very friendly, a DO person from the Russian side,” Curran said, “but very protective of the CIA. She thought she was in charge and would decide what the FBI got. We had to resolve that right away. We immediately had conflicts. She’s trying to protect the agency’s jewels, and we’re trying to investigate.”
Soon, Mary Sommer, a CIA reports officer from the Central Eurasian (CE) division, was brought in to run the unit, although Bannerman remained a member. With all the bureaucratic clashes going on, Curran imported Jim Milburn from the FBI to work with the SIU. Milburn was one of the two analysts who had prepared the study of moles in the FBI that Robert Hanssen had directed in 1988.
Essentially, the mole hunt never ended, because the search for penetrations carried out under the cryptonyms TRAPDOOR, ANLACE, PLAYACTOR/SKYLIGHT, and NIGHTMOVER had now been taken over by the SIU. “There was no crypt,” said Curran. “We didn’t want people to know what we were doing.”
Although there were only ten CIA and FBI sp
ecialists who composed the SIU, fifty or sixty FBI agents were assigned to the mole hunt at Buzzard’s Point, then the location of the bureau’s Washington field office. “They had desks and badges at CIA and could come and go as they pleased,” Curran said.
In addition to those assigned to the field office and at the CIA, other agents at FBI headquarters were detailed to the search for the mole. They were based, and kept their files, in the “Black Vault,” an oddly shaped secure room on the fourth floor directly across from the Soviet section where Hanssen had worked.*
In the FBI’s New York City field office, meanwhile, a separate mole hunt was in progress. Cases had gone bad, and the bureau had source information hinting that there was a penetration in the New York office. Louis Freeh, the new FBI director, became convinced that agents in the Big Apple were not pursuing the problem vigorously enough. Freeh abruptly transferred the bureau’s New York counterintelligence chief and named Thomas J. Pickard, an accountant by training, to replace him. Pickard in turn brought Tim Caruso to New York as his deputy.
Soon a more intense mole hunt was under way. Robert Wade was dispatched from headquarters to work the case “off campus,” in FBI parlance, which meant he operated quietly out of an apartment on the west side of Manhattan, with a team of three or four agents from headquarters and a like number carefully chosen from the New York field office.
According to Pickard, the mole hunters drew up a list of everyone, including special agents, who worked in counterintelligence and had access to the cases that had gone south. “About two hundred employees, special agents, support employees, were looked at,” he said. One FBI agent in particular became the chief suspect, but nothing was ever proven against him.
As in most mole hunts, other innocent agents were caught up in the net. A. Jackson Lowe, the assistant counterintelligence chief in New York, was summoned to the airport at one point to meet a group of senior FBI officials from headquarters. The spy in the New York field office, they informed him, had met his Russian contact somewhere away from the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. Grimly, they informed Lowe that the suspect walked with a limp. The counterspies from headquarters had asked Lowe to come to the airport because they knew that his partner walked with a limp, the result of a degenerative bone disease. A man with a limp! It began to sound like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Lowe didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. His partner, he said, was the field office liaison with the KGB. “He goes into the mission every six weeks,” Lowe told the officials. “He wouldn’t need to meet anyone outside the mission.”
There was never any case made against Lowe’s partner, a loyal agent, and the suspicions were soon dropped. But the man had tears in his eyes when Lowe later told him what had happened. “How could they even think I would do something like that?” he asked.
The sweeping New York mole hunt that began in 1993 found no moles. But about two years later, with the help of a Russian defector, the FBI did uncover the agent, no longer in New York, who had been the penetration. The bureau gave him the code name BLINDSWITCH.
He was Earl Edwin Pitts, an FBI counterintelligence agent who spied for the KGB in New York for five years, between 1987 and 1992, and was paid $124,000. He turned over to the Soviets details of FBI counterintelligence operations against the Russians. The Russian defector, Rollan G. Dzheikiya, told the FBI he had introduced Pitts to the KGB at the New York Public Library.
Dzheikiya had been the Communist Party chief at the mission, an unpopular job, since staffers were required to kick back a huge chunk of their salaries to the Party. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Dzheikiya stayed in New York, trying to make it on his own. He hoped to remain in the United States and needed a green card to become a permanent resident. So he was amenable to helping the FBI when the bureau, aware of his circumstances, came knocking at his door.
The bureau ran a sting against Pitts, with agents posing as Russians. He was arrested in December 1996, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to twenty-seven years. He told investigators he began spying because he had become enraged at the FBI, in part because of his low pay and the high cost of living in New York.
* * *
In Washington, the secret joint effort of the FBI and the CIA, if it did not pick up the scent of Robert Hanssen, at least played a role in the unmasking both of Earl Pitts and of another spy, this one in the CIA.
Harold James Nicholson, the highest-ranking CIA officer ever charged with espionage, was arrested at Dulles Airport in November 1996 as he prepared to fly to Switzerland to meet his Russian handler. When Nicholson fell under suspicion, some two hundred FBI agents had been assigned to the case. The investigation of the CIA officer was at the root of some of the static between the two agencies. “A lot of people in SIU thought Nicholson was not the guy, we were picking on him,” said one FBI man. “That’s where Curran and Redmond got at odds with each other.”
Handsome, smooth, friendly, and articulate, Nicholson did seem an unlikely spy. He had been CIA station chief in Romania, then deputy chief of station in Malaysia. But divorced, with three children and short of money, he asked the SVR rezident in Kuala Lumpur for $25,000, eventually collecting $300,000 from the Russians. In return he gave Moscow the names of about three hundred graduates of the Farm, the CIA training base near Williamsburg, Virginia, and hundreds of documents, including a summary of the debriefing of Aldrich Ames after Ames had pleaded guilty to espionage. Nicholson, who liked to call himself Batman, agreed to cooperate with the government and was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison.
While the mole hunters were wrapping up these high-profile spy cases, the CIA and the FBI were slowly working their way through a bureaucratic maze known inside the CIA as “the A-to-Z list.” The list was a direct fallout from the Ames case. The Counterespionage Group and CIA’s Office of Security (OS) were reviewing a huge backlog of polygraph tests to make sure another mole was not lurking somewhere inside Langley. It was a tedious, time-consuming job.
“The A-to-Z list had about three hundred people who had SPRs,” said one CIA official. “Significant Physiological Responses on the polygraph. Some of those on the list had nothing to do with CI. Some had contacts with foreign nationals. Several dozen were referred to the bureau, as required by law. The vast majority were sorted out by the Office of Security.”
“Gradually, over several years we cleared most of it up,” another CIA man said. There were two parallel efforts going on, he explained. “You had OS and the Counterespionage Group and the bureau working on the A-to-Z list. Simultaneously, SIU and the bureau were working on the new search for penetrations.
“There were people on the A-to-Z list whose careers were affected. Some people didn’t get to go overseas. The agency’s polygraphers got very tough because they had been criticized for having passed Ames. In the hysterical atmosphere after Ames, there were agency people referred to the bureau. And the bureau takes their time, but they were overwhelmed with the numbers.” The job of sifting through the three hundred names on the CIA list took years. Even after Hanssen’s arrest in 2001, several of the A-to-Z cases were still unresolved.
The same directive issued by President Clinton that established the Counterespionage Group also created a government-wide interagency panel to coordinate counterintelligence in the light of the Ames debacle. The National Counterintelligence Center, or NACIC, was housed at CIA headquarters, and its chief was Michael J. Waguespack, a senior FBI counterspy.
Robert Hanssen was particularly interested in the new center, perhaps because it would have afforded him access to counterintelligence information from all agencies of the government across the board, as well as information about counterintelligence activities overseas. Because NACIC was only a research and coordinating body, FBI agents involved in operational activities were not stampeding to join the new center. But Hanssen pressed Waguespack to get him transferred into NACIC.
“You’ll have to take a polygraph,” Hanssen was cautioned.
Hanssen had never had to take a lie detector test during his entire career in the FBI. No thanks, he replied; he had been reflecting further about the transfer and thought he might just as well remain at headquarters.
*Both SPIDERWEB and MONOPOLY, the tunnel under the Soviet embassy, were betrayed to the KGB by Hanssen, but of course this was not yet known in 1994.
*According to David Major, “The vault was the off-limits office where they were looking for a penetration. Officially we didn’t know what they were doing, but everybody knew.” Robert Hanssen certainly was aware of what was going on in the Black Vault, a few feet from his own desk.
21
Mole Wars
Pete O’Donnell thought there was something odd about the Pitts case. O’Donnell was a veteran FBI counterspy who had worked for a dozen years in New York City on Squad 30, the unit that watched the KGB.
Earl Edwin Pitts, the FBI counterintelligence agent, had been arrested as a Russian spy in 1996. At headquarters, Special Agent Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr., was assigned to direct the damage assessment. Kimmel had little background in foreign counterintelligence, so he called in O’Donnell to help him.
At fifty-five, Kimmel was a tall, wiry man, with blond hair and blue eyes, handsome enough to be cast as the older cowhand in a Hollywood western. His consuming preoccupation, aside from his work, was to try to remove the stain on the family name. His grandfather was Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, who with Army Lieutenant General Walter Short was officially blamed for the disaster when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
