SALT
RESEARCH
December 18, 2008
CIA COUNTERINTELLIGENCE (CI)
The most likely ruthless pursuer of a Sleeper within the CIA would be a Counter Intelligence Officer (CI).
In general counterintelligence officers are conniving and devious and sometimes even evil in their pursuit. They are not warm and friendly. If they do befriend you then, “you better watch out.”
There is nothing open and inviting about a Counterintelligence Officer. They are both controlled in their demeanor and controlling. They always choose their words carefully.
Counterintelligence officers are looking for the mole under every rock and they are always setting traps.
It is smart to never screw with CI and be careful not to make them an enemy. If you screw with them, they will screw with you.
The people who work in CI tend to be extremely smart, master Chess players, who enjoy the game and thinking through the moves and counter moves.
If an Operations Officer were fingered as a Sleeper there would be a tug of war between the boss in the Directorate of Operations (DO) and the Counterintelligence officer over who gets to run the operation. The Counter Intelligence Officers inclination and desire would be to completely take over the operation. The strongest personality with the most powerful alliances is always the one who wins.
The Counterintelligence officer would use security in pursuit of the Sleeper but his primary tool would be his mind. As soon as a person runs they would immediately be thinking through the moves and trying to get one step ahead. Some of the questions they would be asking are, “where would they be running?” “Who are their contacts?” “Who/what is their support system?” “Where would they go to get money, passports etc…?, Where would they preposition themselves.”
If the person being pursuit is an CIA Operations officer there would know that he/she has been trained by the CIA to do certain things. They might also know that the person, in order to shake the pursuers, is going to try to think outside the box so they will try to make a guess at what that “out of the box” idea might be. For example, the last place Salt would go to pick up items if she knows she’s being chased is home. Therefore this makes it the perfect place to keep her “bug out” kit. Someone else on the team might say, “she won’t go home,” but that’s exactly what she does and that’s what the Counterintelligence Officer is able to figure out she would do. The Officer on the run would always try and go in a direction the pursuers would never imagine while the Counterintelligence Officer is trying to imagine just such a scenario.
While the Counterintelligence Officer is pursuing the Sleeper he would also be trying to shut down any vulnerabilities, information, people, places or people she might have compromised.
The Counterintelligence Officer would have two motives driving him in pursuit of the Sleeper. On the one hand their would be a concern about the possible assassination and a desire to stop it from happening. This might necessitate going big and alerting other branches of law enforcement. On the other hand there would be concern over having the knowledge that one of their own officers has gone bad leaking out. The desire would be to keep the whole operation quite, put the best people on it and handle the whole thing quietly. There would be a constant tension between these two motives throughout the operation (this is also a tension that could be represented by two pursuers who possess these conflicting motives).
COUNTERINTELLIGENCE - General
“If you look you will find.” – Connie Allen, former Army Counterintelligence Officer
1. CIA’s
“Like the other two centers (Counterterrorist, non-proliferation), the CIA’s counterintelligence center is a community-wide function. Originally headed by Gardner R. (Gus) Hathaway, a former chief of Soviet/East Europe Division and a former Moscow station chief, it concentrates on countering efforts by hostile intelligence services to thwart and penetrate the CIA within the U.S. and particularly overseas. Its function overlaps to some degree with the Office of Security, which is charged with protecting the agency and its secrets.
The
2. What are the responsibilities of the counterintelligence staff? – Robert Kessler
The Counterintelligence Staff tries to uncover efforts by opposing intelligence services, such as the SVRR from the Russians, to infiltrate or penetrate the CIA. So it's spy versus spy, and that is very important. We saw what happened with Aldridge Ames, for example, a CIA officer who was recruited by
3. The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence: A Never-Ending Necessity by James M. Olson.
From the CIA website
The need for counterintelligence (CI) has not gone away, nor is it likely to. The end of the Cold War has not even meant an end to the CI threat from the former
The Russians are not alone. There have been serious, well-publicized concerns about Chinese espionage in the
Paul Redmond, the former Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence at the CIA, told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in early 2000 that a total of at least 41 countries are trying to spy on the
The
A Choice Assignment
When I joined the CIA, one of my first interim assignments was with the old CI Staff. I found it fascinating. I was assigned to write a history of the Rote Kapelle, the Soviet espionage network in Nazi-occupied
With its expanded computer power, NSA was breaking out the actual messages sent between the NKVD center in
There I was, a brand new junior officer, literally the first person in the CIA to see the day-to-day traffic from these life-and-death operations. I was deeply affected by the fear, heroism, and drama in these messages. Above all, I felt privileged to have been given such an opportunity.
Building on an earlier study of the Rote Kapelle by the CI Staff, I completed a draft several months later that incorporated the new material. To my great surprise, this study was well received by my immediate superiors, and I was told that I was to be rewarded with a personal interview and congratulations from James Jesus Angleton, the legendary head of the CI Staff from 1954 to 1974.
Angleton’s office was on the second floor of the
The room was dark, the curtains were drawn, and there was just one small lamp on Angleton’s desk. I later heard that Angleton had eye trouble and that the light hurt his eyes, but I was convinced the real reason for the semidarkness was to add to his mystique. It certainly worked on me!
I nervously briefed Angleton on my study, and he listened without interrupting, just nodding from time to time. When I finished, he methodically attacked every one of my conclusions. Didn’t I know the traffic was a deception? Hadn’t it occurred to me that Leopold Trepper, the leader of the Rote Kapelle, was a German double? He went on and on, getting further and further out.
Even I, as a brand new officer, could tell that this great mind, this CI genius, had lost it. I thought he was around the bend. It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my career.
When the meeting was over, I was glad to get out of there, and I vowed to myself that I would never go anywhere near CI again. I did not keep that vow. In my overseas assignments with the Agency, I found myself drawn toward Soviet CI operations. Nothing seemed to quicken my pulse more, and I was delighted when I was called back to Headquarters in 1989 to join the new Counterintelligence Center (CIC) as Ted Price’s deputy. When Ted moved upstairs in early 1991 to become the Associate Deputy Director for Operations, I was named chief of the Center.
Today, many years after that initial disagreeable encounter with CI, I find it hard to believe that it is actually my picture on the wall of the CIC conference room at CIA Headquarters, where the photos of all former CIA counterintelligence chiefs are displayed. There I am, number seven in a row that begins with Angleton.
So, after a career that ended up being far more CI-oriented than I could ever have imagined, I would like to offer some personal observations in the form of “The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence.” I have chosen the form of commandments because I believe the basic rules of CI are immutable and should be scrupulously followed. In my view, it makes little difference whether the adversary is the Russians, the Cubans, the East Germans, the Chinese, or someone else. It likewise makes little difference whether we are talking about good CI practices in 1985 or in 2005. Unfortunately, as I watch US CI today, I am increasingly concerned that the principles I consider fundamental to effective CI are not being followed as carefully and consistently as they should be.
These commandments were not handed down to me from a mountaintop, and I make no claim that they are inspired or even definitive. They are simply the culmination, for what they are worth, of my experience. They are intended primarily for my fellow practitioners in CI today, but also for any younger officers in the Intelligence Community (IC) who might someday want to join us.
The First Commandment: Be Offensive
CI that is passive and defensive will fail. We cannot hunker down in a defensive mode and wait for things to happen. I believe we are spending far too much money on fences, safes, alarms, and other purely defensive measures to protect our secrets. That is not how we have been hurt in recent years. Spies have hurt us. Our CI mindset should be relentlessly offensive. We need to go after our CI adversaries.
Aggressive double agent (DA) operations are essential to any CI program, but not the predictable, hackneyed kind we have so often pursued. We need to push our bright and imaginative people to produce clever new scenarios for controlled operations, and we need more of them. The opposition services should be kept constantly off guard so that they never suspect that we have actually controlled the operations they believe they initiated from the beginning. When the requirements, modus operandi, and personality objectives of the DA operation have been achieved, we should in a greater number of cases pitch the opposition case officer. If only one out of 10 or 20 of these recruitments takes, it is worth it. And CI professionals, of course, should not rely exclusively on their own efforts. They should constantly prod their HUMINT colleagues to identify, target, and recruit officers from the opposition intelligence services. The key to CI success is penetration. For every American spy, there are several members of the opposition service who know who he or she is. No matter what it takes, we have to have penetrations.
We should operate aggressively against the nontraditional as well as the traditional adversaries. How many examples do we need of operations against Americans by so-called friendly countries to convince us that the old intelligence adage is correct: there are friendly nations, but no friendly intelligence services. If we suspect for whatever reason that the operatives of a foreign intelligence service, friend or foe, are operating against us, we should test them. We should dress up an enticing morsel, made to order for that specific target, and send it by them. If they take it, we have learned something we needed to know, and we have an operation. If they reject it, as true friends should, we have learned something, too. In either event, because we are testing a “friend,” plausible deniability has to be strictly preserved. Every foreign service is a potential nontraditional adversary; no service should get a lifetime pass from US offensive CI operations.
The Second Commandment: Honor Your Professionals
It has been true for years—to varying degrees throughout the IC—that CI professionals have not been favored, to the extent they deserved, with promotions, assignments, awards, praise, esteem, or other recognition. The truth is that CI officers are not popular. They are not always welcome when they walk in. They usually bring bad news. They are easy marks to criticize when things go wrong. Their successes are their failures. If they catch a spy, they are roasted for having taken so long. If they are not catching anyone, why not? What have they done with all that money they spent on CI? It is no-win.
For much of my career, many of our best people avoided becoming CI specialists. CI was not prestigious. It had a bad reputation. It was not fast track. It did not lead to promotions or good assignments. Angleton left a distasteful legacy that for years discredited the CI profession. Ted Price did more than anyone else in the Agency to reverse that trend and to rehabilitate CI as a respected professional discipline.
Nevertheless, that battle is still not completely won. We have to do more to get our CI people promoted, recognized, and respected so that our best young officers will be attracted to follow us into what we know is a noble profession and where the need is so great.
The Third Commandment: Own the Street
This is so fundamental to CI, but it is probably the least followed of the commandments. Any CI program worthy of the name has to be able to engage the opposition on the street, the field of play for espionage. And when we do go to the street, we have to be the best service there. If we are beaten on the street, it is worse than not having been there at all.
For years, we virtually conceded the streets of the world’s capitals, including the major espionage centers, to the KGB, the GRU, and the East European services because we either did not know how to do it or we were not willing to pay the price for a thoroughly professional, reliable, full-time, local surveillance capability.
Opposition intelligence officers have to be watched, known meeting areas have to be observed, and, when an operation goes down—often on short notice—undetectable surveillance has to cover it, identify the participants, and obtain evidence.
This capability is expensive—selection, training, vehicles, photo gear, video, radios, safe apartments, observation posts, and on and on—but, if we do not have it, we will be a second-rate CI service and will not break the major cases.
The Fourth Commandment: Know Your History
I am very discouraged when I talk to young CI officers today to find how little they know about the history of American CI. CI is a difficult and dangerous discipline. Many good, well-meaning CI people have gone wrong and made horrendous mistakes. Their failures in most cases are well documented, but the lessons are lost if our officers do not read the CI literature.
I find it inconceivable that any CI practitioner today could ply his or her trade without an in-depth knowledge of the Angleton era. Have our officers read Mangold? Have they read Legend and Wilderness of Mirrors? Do they know the Loginov case, HONETOL, MHCHAOS, Nosenko, Pollard, and Shadrin? Are they familiar with Aspillaga and the Cuban DA debacle? Have they examined our mistakes in the
I believe it is an indispensable part of the formation of any American CI officer—and certainly a professional obligation—to study the CI failures of the past, to reflect on them, and to make sure they are not repeated.
The many CI courses being offered now are a positive step, but there will never be a substitute for a personal commitment on the part of our CI professionals to read their history, usually on their own time at home.
The Fifth Commandment: Do Not Ignore Analysis
Analysis has too often been the stepchild of CI. Throughout the CI community, we have fairly consistently understaffed it. We have sometimes tried to make it up as we go along. We have tried to do it on the cheap.
Generally speaking, operators make bad analysts. We are different kinds of people. Operators are actors, doers, movers and shakers; we are quick, maybe a little impulsive, maybe a little “cowboy.” Our best times are away from our desks. We love the street. Research and analysis is really not our thing—and when we have tried to do it, we have not been good at it.
True analysts are different. They love it. They are more cerebral, patient, and sedentary. They find things we could not. They write better.
A lot of CI programs in the past have tried to make operators double as their own analysts. As a result, in the
A good CI program will recruit and train true analysts in sizable numbers. I do not think it would be excessive as a rule of thumb in a top notch CI service to be evenly divided between operators and analysts. Very few of our US CI agencies come anywhere close to that ratio.
Wonderful things happen when good analysts in sufficient numbers pore over our DA reports, presence lists, SIGINT, audio and teltap transcripts, maps, travel data, and surveillance reports. They find the clues, make the connections, and focus our efforts in the areas that will be most productive.
Many parts of the US CI community have gotten the message and have incorporated trained analysts into their operations, but others have not. Across the board, we still have serious shortfalls in good, solid CI analysis.
The Sixth Commandment: Do Not Be Parochial
More harm probably has been done to US CI over the years by interagency sniping and obstruction than by our enemies. I remember when the CIA and the FBI did not even talk to each other—and both had disdain for the military services. It is no wonder that CI was a shambles and that some incredibly damaging spies went uncovered for so long.
Occasionally in my career, I encountered instances of sarcasm or outright bad mouthing of other US Government agencies by my officers. That kind of attitude and cynicism infected our junior officers and got in the way of cooperation. These comments often were intended to flaunt our supposed “superiority” by demeaning the capabilities of the other organizations. I dealt with these situations by telling the officers to “knock it off,” and I would encourage other CI supervisors around the community to do the same.
CI is so difficult, even in the best of circumstances, that the only way to do it is together. We should not let personalities, or jealousies, or turf battles get in the way of our common mission. Our colleagues in our sister services are as dedicated, professional, hardworking, and patriotic as we are, and they deserve our respect and cooperation. The best people I have known in my career have been CI people, regardless of their organizational affiliation. So let us be collegial.
The Seventh Commandment: Train Your People
CI is a distinct discipline and an acquired skill. It is not automatically infused in us when we get our wings as case officers. It is not just a matter of applying logic and common sense to operations, but is instead a highly specialized way of seeing things and analyzing them. CI has to be learned.
I do not know how many times in my career I have heard, “No, we do not really need a separate CI section. We are all CI officers; we’ll do our own CI.” That is a recipe for compromise and failure.
There are no substitutes for professional CI officers, and only extensive, regular, and specialized CI training can produce them. Such training is expensive, so whenever possible we should do it on a Community basis to avoid duplication and to ensure quality.
CI is a conglomerate of several disciplines and skills. A typical operation, for example, might include analysts, surveillance specialists, case officers, technical experts, and DA specialists. Each area requires its own specialized training curriculum. It takes a long time to develop CI specialists, and that means a sustained investment in CI training. We are getting better, but we are not there yet.
The Eighth Commandment: Do Not Be Shoved Aside
There are people in the intelligence business and other groups in the US Government who do not particularly like CI officers. CI officers have a mixed reputation. We see problems everywhere. We can be overzealous. We get in the way of operations. We cause headaches. We are the original “black hatters.”
Case officers want their operations to be bona fide. Senior operations managers do not want to believe that their operations are controlled or penetrated by the opposition. There is a natural human tendency on the part of both case officers and senior operations managers to resist outside CI scrutiny. They believe that they are practicing good CI themselves and do not welcome being second-guessed or told how to run their operations by so-called CI specialists who are not directly involved in the operations. I have seen far more examples of this in my CI career than I care to remember.
By the same token, defense and intelligence contractors and bureaucrats running sensitive US Government programs have too often tended to minimize CI threats and to resist professional CI intervention. CI officers, in their view, stir up problems and overreact to them. Their “successes” in preventing CI problems are invisible and impossible to measure, but their whistle blowing when problems are uncovered generate tremendous heat. It is not surprising that they are often viewed as a net nuisance.
When necessary, a CI service has to impose itself on the organizations and groups it is assigned to protect. A CI professional who is locked out or invited in only when it is convenient to the host cannot do his job.
My advice to my CI colleagues has always been this: “If you are blocked by some senior, obtuse, anti-CI officer, go around him or through him by going to higher management. And document all instances of denied access, lack of cooperation, or other obstruction to carrying out your CI mission. If not, when something goes wrong, as it likely will in that kind of situation, you in CI will take the blame.”
The Ninth Commandment: Do Not Stay Too Long
CI is a hazardous profession. There should be warning signs on the walls: “A steady diet of CI can be dangerous to your health.”
I do not believe anyone should make an entire, uninterrupted career of CI. We all who work in CI have seen it: the old CI hand who has gotten a bit spooky. It is hard to immerse oneself daily in the arcane and twisted world of CI without falling prey eventually to creeping paranoia, distortion, warping, and overzealousness in one’s thinking. It is precisely these traits that led to some of the worst CI disasters in our history. Angleton and his coterie sadly succumbed, with devastating results. Others in the CIA and elsewhere have as well. The danger is always there.
My wife, who was working at the CIA when I met her, was well acquainted with this reputation of CI and the stories about its practitioners. When I was serving overseas and received the cable offering me the position as Ted Price’s deputy in the new
Sensible and productive CI needs lots of ventilation and fresh thinking. There should be constant flowthrough. Non-CI officers should be brought in regularly on rotational tours. I also believe it is imperative that a good CI service build in rotational assignments outside CI for its CI specialists. They should go spend two or three years with the operators or with the other groups they are charged to protect. They will come back refreshed, smarter, and less likely to fall into the nether world of professional CI: the school of doublethink, the us-against-them mindset, the nothing-is-what-it-seems syndrome, or the wilderness of mirrors.
The Tenth Commandment: Never Give Up
The tenth and last commandment is the most important. What if the
The FBI is making cases against Americans today that involved espionage committed in the 1960s and 1970s. The Army’s Foreign Counterintelligence Activity is doing the same. The name of the game in CI is persistence. CI officers who are not patient need not apply. There is no statute of limitations for espionage, and we should not create one by our own inaction. Traitors should know that they will never be safe and will never have a peaceful night’s sleep. I applauded my CI colleagues in the FBI when I read not long ago of their arrest in
If we keep a CI investigation alive and stay on it, the next defector, the next penetration, the next tip, the next surveillance, or the next clue will break it for us.
If there were ever to be a mascot for
In Conclusion
These are my ten commandments of CI. Other CI professionals will have their own priorities and exhortations and will disagree with mine. That is as it should be, because as a country and as an Intelligence Community we need a vigorous debate on the future direction of US CI. Not everyone will agree with the specifics, or even the priorities. What we should agree on, however, is that strong CI has to be a national priority. Recent news reports from
James M. Olson served in the Directorate of Operations and is now on the faculty of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at
A Look at Two Famous CIA Counterintelligence Mole Hunts
1. The CIA Dug for Moles but buried Loyalty, The New York Times, March 8, 1992
James Angleton’s failed search for the CIA mole “Sasha.”
Three years ago the Central Intelligence Agency gave S. Peter Karlow a small bronze medal, a citation in a blue leatherette binder and a check for close to $500,000. It was the agency's way of saying there had been a terrible mistake.
More than two decades earlier, the C.I.A. had falsely branded Mr. Karlow as a suspected mole, a spy within the agency's ranks. "I walked down the street and a flower pot fell off the roof and landed on me," Mr. Karlow, who is now 71 years old and lives in
His case, and those of other agency employees who became victims of the agency's hunts for moles in the 1960's and early 1970's, are detailed in a book by David Wise, "Molehunt: the Secret Search For Traitors That Shattered the C.I.A." The book will be published by Random House on March 16. Into Professional Exile
After 10 years of research and more than 650 interviews, Mr. Wise writes that the agency paid Mr. Karlow and two other former employees a total of more than $700,000 to compensate them for having wrongly accused them of disloyalty. The payments were made under an obscure law that became known within the agency as the "Mole Relief Act."
Paul Garbler, the C.I.A.'s first station chief in
Mark Mansfield, a C.I.A. spokesman, said agency officials declined to coment on Mr. Wise's book because, they said, they not yet seen it. But he added, "Several agency employees did receive compensation under what has often been referred to as the Mole Relief Act."
The cases of the three former officials were known from news reports and previous books about the period. But Mr. Wise, a longtime
Mr. Wise says that the files of up to 120 employees were reviewed in the hunt for Soviet agents at the C.I.A. More than 50 employees were actually investigated, and at least 16 were treated as serious suspects, although former Directors of Central Intelligence, like William E. Colby, say no Soviet penetration was uncovered. Christmastime in
Mr. Wise's account, which was confirmed by other current and former intelligence officials in interviews, begins shortly before Christmas in 1961, when Anatoly M. Golitsin, a K.G.B. officer who became one of the best-known Soviet defectors, turned up on the snowy doorstep of the C.I.A.'s station chief in
Mr. Golitsin touched off panic, telling C.I.A. officials that he had seen information at K.G.B. headquarters that came from high in the C.I.A. "The mole, he told his C.I.A. interrogators, was someone of Slavic background whose name might have ended in 'sky,' " Mr. Wise writes. "He had been stationed in
The defector's account seemed to confirm the worst suspicions of the C.I.A's top counterintelligence official, James Jesus Angleton, the reclusive orchid-grower, fly-fisherman and graduate of Yale who, in the depths of the cold war, operated with icy suspicion.
Mr. Angleton scoured the agency for K.G.B. spies from 1954 until 1974, when Mr. Colby dismissed him. Although some agency officials dispute it, others like Mr. Colby say the counterintelligence excesses of the Angleton period nearly paralyzed the C.I.A.'s efforts to spy on the Kremlin. Mr. Angleton died in 1987. A Master Gadgeteer
To Mr. Angleton and his investigators, the book goes on, Mr. Karlow appeared to neatly fit Mr. Golitsin's profile of "Sasha." His last name began with the letter "K." His last name at birth had been Klibansky. His father had been born in
And there was more. At one time, Mr. Wise writes, Mr. Karlow was the closest thing the C.I.A. had to "Q," the master gadgeteer of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. Mr. Karlow had worked to develop a tiny eavesdropping device like one the Soviets planted in a carved replica of the Great Seal of the
The mole hunters suspected that the Soviets had obtained information about the project, because when Mr. Golitsin defected he brought with him a technical paper suggesting that the Soviets knew of a United States-British program to duplicate the bugging device. As the head of the American effort, Mr. Karlow quickly became the mole hunters' prime suspect.
His case was turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for possible prosecution. In early 1963, the book relates, two agents questioned Mr. Karlow for five days, gave him a polygraph examination and finally accused him of being a spy. His career in a nightmarish descent, Mr. Karlow resigned from the agency at the age of 42, insisting on his innocence to an intelligence agency that no longer listened.
He seemed trapped in a maze. Once, he demanded specific allegations to rebut and was given two dates in 1951 and 1952 when he was supposedly in East Berlin secretly meeting his Soviet contact. After reconstructing his whereabouts, Mr. Karlow showed that he had been elsewhere on both occasions. But a C.I.A. security official asserted that only a spy could establish such a solid alibi.
Mr. Wise discovered that the F.B.I. interrogators had cleared Mr. Karlow, although he was never officially told that. And Mr. Wise said that Mr. Angleton learned from British officials that the Soviets had been tipped off about the C.I.A.'s attempt to copy their miniature bug from George Blake, a British intelligence officer who was caught spying for the Soviets, was sentenced to prison in 1961 and later escaped and fled to
Mr. Garbler was a decorated Navy dive-bomber pilot in the Pacific during World War II. In 1961, he was named the C.I.A.'s first station chief in
Mr. Garbler returned to C.I.A. headquarters, his star on the rise until 1966, when his promotion to head the agency's clandestine operations in
A friend told Mr. Garbler that his career had dimmed because he, too, was under suspicion as a mole. His last name did not begin with the letter "K," but his father had emigrated from
Years later, when Mr. Garbler had retired and was working in the land-investment business in
Eventually, Mr. Golitsin was permitted to read secret agency files, and in 1964 the defector found another "Sasha." He was Richard Kovich, the son of Serbian immigrants, who had worked in
Mr. Kovich's career skidded into an irreversible stall. In 1974, when he was 47, he retired and moved to
Eventually, all three former C.I.A. employees learned they had been investigated, but that the agency had turned up no proof of their disloyalty, and that they were no longer under suspicion. Subsequent studies concluded that Mr. Golitsin had been a genuine defector, but that his claims were overblown. A High Cost in Pain
Even so, the mole hunt had cost Mr. Karlow, Mr. Garbler and Mr. Kovich their reputations and damaged their careers. Mr. Kovich and Mr. Garbler hired lawyers who lobbied Congress for a compensation bill, which was signed into law in October 1980 by President Jimmy Carter.
Mr. Garbler and Mr. Kovich sought and received compensation in 1981. But Mr. Karlow, who became an executive at the Monsanto Corporation after he left the agency, was turned down. That decision was reversed in 1988 by William H. Webster, then the Director of Central Intelligence, and a second bill was quietly passed.
2. The
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,982964,00.html
From the spring of 1985 until February 1994, Aldrich Ames was
Even though
In the midst of this devastating episode, the perseverance, brains and character of only a handful of people stand out. One of them is a quiet, gray-haired woman named Jeanne Vertefeuille. Until now her role in tracking down
At first glance, Jeanne Vertefeuille might have seemed an unlikely choice to hunt down the most damaging mole in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was so plain looking, so mousy and nondescript that she would never stand out in a crowd, which suited her. She had never married, as far as anyone knew. The CIA was her life. She lived alone in a condo in
She was, however, almost preordained for the task. For years she had toiled quietly in the research section of the Soviet division and the counterintelligence staff. There was hardly an important, or even an unimportant, case involving the KGB or the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) that she did not know. Jeanne Vertefeuille could follow the tangled threads that might link a case in
She liked to work in obscurity. Within the agency there were some who compared her to John le Carre's fictional Connie Sachs, the brilliant researcher who knew all the Soviet cases and embodied the institutional memory of the Circus. But Vertefeuille did not encourage such talk; it veered too close to a kind of celebrity.
She was fluent in French, in which her name means "green leaf." She seldom talked about herself, but it was known she had grown up in the Northeast. She had been posted to
In 1984 she was named chief of station in
When Vertefeuille went to
It was the largest amount of sensitive data ever passed to the KGB in a single meeting. Inside the bags was the most secret information
During the course of the next 12 months,
It was clear--or should have been--that something had gone terribly wrong. The likelihood that all these agents had been arrested because they or the CIA made operational mistakes simply defied the law of averages and common sense. Some other explanation--a compromised code or a KGB penetration of CIA communications--was possible, but remote. Everything pointed toward a human penetration. A mole.
It was a hideous prospect--that someone inside the CIA was betraying the agency's operations to the KGB. Faced with a disaster of such apocalyptic proportions, the agency might have been expected to turn
Among the senior officials at the directorate of operations, there was a presumption that no colleague could be a traitor. Still, the possibility of a mole could not be discounted. In January 1986, CIA Director William Casey asked for a review of the compromised agents. Although that report concluded that they had probably been lost for operational reasons, Clair George, the deputy director for operations, did not agree. He told Casey, "I think we've been penetrated." Not until October 1986, however--almost a year after the CIA began to realize it had a serious problem--did it finally act to try to pinpoint the source of the trouble. George ordered Gus Hathaway, the counterintelligence chief, to appoint a small special task force to study the problem. Hathaway named Vertefeuille, who had returned from
At first the team consisted of only four people. It would have to start from scratch in analyzing the unexplained losses and trying to find their cause. Not a single member was trained in criminal work. It was clear from the resources allocated to Vertefeuille that finding the mole was not a high priority among the CIA's leaders. Why not? "They didn't want to know," said one intelligence official. "If you find a mole, you have to deal with him. It becomes embarrassingly public."
To help her, Vertefeuille had only Fran Smith, a veteran in the Soviet division, and two retirees, Benjamin Franklin Pepper and Daniel Niesciur. Later, Sandy Grimes, another experienced officer in the Soviet division, joined the team. The assignment of three women--Vertefeuille, Smith and Grimes--reflected a sexist belief among the CIA's senior male executives that "little gray-haired old ladies," as one case officer put it, were best suited to perform the painstaking work of catching a mole. Computers might help, the prevailing wisdom went, but only the women had the patience and the skills to go through mountains of files and extract clues.
The special task force was housed on the second floor at
Vertefeuille's job, and the team's, was to look at all the compromised cases and to discover, first, which CIA offices had handled or known of them and which officers had access to the files. They were asked to find any common strands among the cases that might provide clues to what had happened. And they were asked to determine how many cases might have been betrayed by Edward Lee Howard, the former CIA officer who sold secrets to the KGB, escaped into the
The task force did not have an easy time. It was not only the lack of support from above, the atmosphere of languid unconcern that permeated the agency's executive suite. The KGB made its own contribution. From the start the KGB assumed that the CIA would look for a penetration after its agents began disappearing.
The KGB forced some of the agents already arrested and imprisoned to take part in various schemes to mislead the CIA. For example, one source arrested by the KGB was made to contact a person in the
This game tied up Vertefeuille and her tiny staff for several years. In 1986 and 1987 the team held a series of meetings with an FBI task force called anlace, which had been set up to try to discover why two KGB officers working for the FBI in Washington had been executed after they returned to Moscow. Then in 1988, the CIA established a new counterintelligence center and folded Vertefeuille and her tiny band of mole hunters into it. She was put in charge of a branch that had responsibility for investigating all cases involving possible penetration of the CIA. The members of Vertefeuille's team were assigned to other cases that were deemed more important than the ones the task force had been set up to probe.
Then in November 1989, the CIA received its first tip pointing to Aldrich Ames. A woman employee of the agency who knew
The CIA now knew that
From July 1986 until July 1989,
Fifteen months after his return to
Fortunately,
On Dec. 5, 1990, Dan Payne sent a memo to the CIA's office of security asking that it open an investigation of
Early in 1991, Paul Redmond became deputy chief of the counterintelligence center. He intensely disliked
In April 1991, Redmond and Vertefeuille went to the FBI and met with Raymond Mislock Jr., chief of the Soviet section of the intelligence division, and Robert Wade, the assistant section chief.
On Nov. 12, 1991, the joint team interviewed
Let the hunters hunt--a mole must enjoy life to the hilt while he can. In January 1992
That spring the joint mole-hunt unit decided to take another look at
This time the agency invoked legal provisions allowing it to query banks and credit companies. In June responses began to flow in, and the task force learned for the first time that Aldrich and Rosario Ames were spending at least $30,000 a month with credit cards. By August the team knew that hundreds of thousands of dollars had been deposited in
In 1992, as the mole hunters drew closer to their target, Jeanne Vertefeuille turned 60, and under CIA rules she had to take mandatory retirement. She had searched for the traitor for almost six years and could have gone off to the
It was Sandy Grimes who in October 1992 made the breakthrough. She correlated the dates of
In January 1993, Vertefeuille's team, persuaded that
The code name stood for both the investigation and
Nightmover ended on the morning of Feb. 21, 1994, when
On April 28, 1994,
"Hi, Rick," said Vertefeuille. And for the first time in a long while, she allowed herself a smile.
Rudy Guerin, looking more like a young English professor than an FBI agent, led the session. Did
Then the debriefing took a dramatic and unexpected turn.
"You're not going to like this," he said, "but I gave them your name."
