Inside the CIA (47 page)

On April 12, 1991, Ames took his fourth test. Ames flunked again on such key questions as whether he had disclosed classified information without authorization. On April 16, he was retested and failed his fifth and final test.

On these tests, as on the others, the CIA polygraph examiners wrote on their reports that Ames had shown deception. They then recounted his elaborate stories, including claims that his worries about money had shown up as deception on key questions. For example, the examiner wrote on the report of Ames’s final exam, “I don’t think he is a spy, but he does have money problems.” Contrary to their own findings, the examiners wrote as their final conclusion, “No deception.” Yet a CIA memo in Ames’s file said Ames had failed all his tests.

Thus the controversy over why Ames beat the polygraph tests was built on a deception—a deception fed by the CIA. After Ames became a suspect, the CIA specifically ordered
that the damaging polygraph results not be communicated to other agencies. However, the joint FBI-CIA squad working the case had already seen Ames’s polygraph reports. Early on, two polygraphers in the FBI’s Washington metropolitan field office wrote a report noting that the CIA had failed Ames and saying that, based on their own readings of the tests, they agreed. Even FBI officials accustomed to the CIA’s blasé attitude about security were astounded.

The fact is that polygraphs, when used by skilled operators, are right in a surprising number of cases. A 1987 FBI study asked FBI agents whether, in retrospect, they felt the polygraph administered in cases they were involved in had been wrong. Based on their responses, the FBI concluded that less than one percent of its own twenty thousand polygraph determinations since 1973 had been incorrect. While subjects can be trained to fool the polygraph by such means as developing a confident attitude and flexing muscles in response to control questions, a good polygraph operator can often penetrate even these stratagems. When subjects take drugs to calm themselves, their polygraph readings appear flat. Noticing this, a polygraph examiner can demand a urine sample, which can be analyzed for the presence of drugs.

While three of the top polygraph examiners in the country work at the CIA, most of the others at the agency are considered within the profession to be lacking in expertise. With characteristic arrogance, the CIA insists on training its own operators instead of sending them to a Defense Department school used by the FBI, NSA, and other federal agencies. The Chicago school where CIA examiners are sent teaches that their perception of a subject’s body language and demeanor should override what the polygraphs tell them. Thus if subjects such as Ames or Koecher are skilled at inventing stories, CIA examiners are taught to accept them. Since spies are whizzes at making up stories, and since they receive further training from the KGB, it is no wonder the CIA’s polygraph operators are no match for them.

Thus the CIA’s polygraph program is a joke, one that searches for ways to ignore signs of deception. Low-level
employees who may have engaged in minor transgressions but have no standing within the agency are flunked. Higher-level employees who are spies are given the benefit of the doubt. By contrast, the FBI’s policy is to report deceptive results without any filtering by polygraph examiners. It is then up to investigators to determine the facts about their activities. In Ames’s case, no investigators were alerted to the fact that he had failed the tests.

How the CIA could disregard its own tests becomes easier to understand when the CIA’s attitude about security and its other failures in the Ames case are examined. How could the agency allow such a heavy drinker as Ames to continue in his sensitive job? The fact is that only the most public and embarrassing drunkenness results in the withdrawal of a CIA officer. In one European country, a CIA officer routinely hit a bar at 10:30
A.M.
It was not until he urinated in his pants in the embassy that the CIA, after much soulsearching, reluctantly transferred him to headquarters. How could the agency have allowed Ames to have access to almost everything? The fact is that the agency’s vaunted “compartmentation” is a joke. Supervisors boast of major successes at meetings, and officers exchange information over lunch or—in Ames’s case—during smoking breaks outside the CIA’s building.

Besides having easy access to almost any information he wanted because of his counterintelligence functions, Ames sat on two promotion boards that allowed him to learn the identities and recruitment successes of hundreds of other CIA officers throughout the world. How could the agency have ignored Ames’s unexplained wealth? The fact is that even when Ames engaged in gross security violations, no disciplinary action was ever meted out. Indeed, after being caught in the CIA safe house in New York with Maria, Ames was promoted.

How could an examiner have blithely dismissed Ames’s demonstrated deception as being related to the Jaguar-owner’s purported worries about money? Not wanting to share their power with polygraphers, and fearful of a tool they do not fully understand, the princes of the CIA pressure examiners to pass subjects who have failed. How
could an officer with Ames’s demonstrated lack of ability even be allowed to work at the CIA, much less in a sensitive position? Coworkers thought Ames was not very bright. Underscoring that judgment, Ames kept notes to his Russian handlers and records of the payments he received from them in his personal computer at home. Ames was either illiterate or made a lot of typos. In one note to his Russian handlers, replicated from a typewriter ribbon, Ames said: “Besides getting cash in Carascus [sic] (I have mentuoned [sic] how little I like this method, though it is acceptable), I still hope that you will have decided on some safer, paper transfer of some sort of a large amount [of money].”

Part of the answer to how the CIA could employ someone of his caliber in a key position is that the CIA has always used counterintelligence as a dumping ground for the least competent officers. Traditionally, the way to advance has been to obtain positive intelligence that will impress the president with the CIA’s capabilities. Forgotten in that shortsighted approach is the fact that without good counterintelligence and security, the best sources in the world will be executed before they have had a chance to tell the CIA anything.

Once officers become part of the exclusive club that constitutes the Directorate of Operations, they are immune from accountability to the outside world. The secrecy, the exclusivity, and the power that go with having inside information all conspire to create an unreal atmosphere that leads to unfathomable disasters such as the Ames case. Like any fashionable club, the clandestine service excludes outsiders such as women, who are looked down upon and given little chance to rise.

The CIA not only protects its own, it punishes those who blow the whistle and object to lax discipline. Such people are considered troublemakers who do not understand the system. Proposals to tighten security are met with exaggeration—that they would turn the CIA into Alcatraz.

After the Ames case broke, the CIA’s inspector general began investigating what went wrong. It was typical of the inspector general’s office that initially Burton L. Gerber was to be in overall charge of the investigation. Gerber was one
of those CIA officials who had promoted Ames. While Gerber was later taken off the case, many of the investigators had previously worked in the Directorate of Operations and would be returning to it once their assignment to the inspector general was over. Having the CIA investigate itself was a waste of time and money.

Instead of improving security, the CIA’s response over the years to embarrassing spy cases has been to try to cover them up by opposing prosecutions that would make its mistakes public. Thus the CIA’s blasé attitude about security is a form of self-protection, a way of insulating CIA officers from accountability. The attitude is fueled by directors of Central Intelligence who consider the subject of security to be both dreary and beneath them.

Instead of signaling that business as usual would not do, Woolsey defended the agency publicly, minimized the damage, and misled the intelligence committees about Ames’s polygraph results, saying he passed with flying colors. Only after the author’s op-ed piece criticizing Woolsey for not taking the polygraph test appeared in the March 8, 1994
New York Times
did Woolsey issue the word that he would take the test. He did not say when.

The CIA was founded to prevent another surprise attack such as occurred at Pearl Harbor. Over the years, the CIA has served that purpose well, predicting most of the changes and threats it should have predicted. But the damage from the Ames case to the CIA’s credibility and to its reputation for protecting its sources and methods was devastating.

“There has been massive incompetence at the CIA,” an official working on the Ames case said.

If the Ames case demonstrated that the CIA’s security system is a failure, it also illustrated how easy it was for the CIA to mislead the press. Besides frequent references to Ames’s passing his polygraph tests instead of failing them, the media ran stories suggesting that the Ames case meant that Yurchenko was not a real defector after all; that it was Ames’s wife, rather than Ames, who had recruited him to spy for the Russians; and that it was brilliant CIA analysis and access to German Stasi files, rather than an FBI defector’s information, that had led to Ames’s arrest; that
Ames’s spying was the fault of the FBI, rather than the CIA; and that the FBI was leaking unfavorable stories about the CIA.

In fact, electronic interception of Ames’s conversations showed that forty-one-year-old Maria Ames did not know about her husband’s spy activities until 1991. Rather than show Yurchenko to be a plant, the Ames case meant that still-unresolved leads Yurchenko provided about moles in the CIA should be pursued even more vigorously, which the FBI began doing. The CIA’s negligence in ignoring all the warning signs that Ames was spying was akin to a bank’s leaving its front door and vault door open overnight. While it would be nice if the police had spotted the open door, the primary fault lay with the institution that left the doors open. Finally, while FBI agents were livid about the way the CIA had allowed both the CIA’s and FBI’s operations to be compromised, many FBI officials went out of their way to downplay the CIA’s blunders. Because they still had to work with the agency, they did not want to exacerbate frictions between the agencies.

If nothing else, the Ames case showed that the subject of spying was not passé. Ever since the Cold War ended, the FBI and CIA had been saying that the Russians continued to spy on the U.S. No one took it seriously. Now the mailbox where Ames was said to have made chalk marks for his KGB handlers at 37th and R Streets NW in Washington was the most photographed mailbox in U.S. history. Tour buses pointed out the location to visitors from out of town. Once out of favor in Hollywood, spy movies again became highly prized.

But the implications of the Ames case are far more serious. If the CIA is to continue to protect the U.S. from potential international threats, it must take drastic action to change the agency climate that led to the Ames case. That change has to begin at the top. By example, the director needs to show that he is ready to make a clean break with the sloppiness of the past. By initially arrogantly refusing to submit to the same security procedure as everyone else, then defending the agency’s gross negligence and incompetence, Woolsey demonstrated that he not only condoned a system
that placed the country at risk, he also was not up to the task of correcting it.

Besides getting a new director, the CIA needed to fire or remove to less-sensitive positions every supervisor who allowed Ames to continue in his job despite the obvious signs that something was wrong. To direct its Office of Security, the CIA needed to appoint a former FBI counterintelligence agent. To be sure, the FBI has made its own mistakes, including allowing Richard W. Miller, who later committed espionage, to continue as an agent. But the lapses have not stemmed from systemic problems. Over the years, the FBI has compiled an impressive record for catching spies.
*
Since 1975, FBI counterintelligence investigations have resulted in the prosecution of more than seventy people for espionage. All but one were convicted. The security departments of most major corporations are headed by former FBI agents, who know how to pursue investigations lawfully and are likely to have good liaison with the bureau.

As it is, the CIA resists FBI investigations. Since 1991, the CIA has refused to cooperate with the bureau or has withheld information on at least ten occasions. Through Ames, the Russians already knew the CIA’s most valuable secrets, yet even as the FBI gathered evidence for a prosecution of Ames, the CIA continued to block the FBI from obtaining information about what Ames knew. The reason is that the CIA does not want the FBI to know of its mistakes, just as it does not really want good security.

In many respects, the lax security is related to the CIA’s other major failing: its continuing collective enmity toward defectors such as Vitaly Yurchenko.
**
The agents betrayed by Ames were, in effect, defectors—in spy jargon, defectors-in-place. CIA officers have contempt for defectors, whom they regard as “pains in the ass”—unbalanced traitors to their own countries. If a man such as Ames betrays them to
the other side, CIA officers do not consider the loss to be great. To them, spying is a game. So long as the princes of the CIA maintain their own lofty positions within the agency, they win.

That judgment was borne out by the way the affair ended. Having received a scathing report from CIA inspector general Frederick P. Hitz about the Ames case, Woolsey reprimanded eleven of the twenty-three present or former CIA officers who were cited in the report for having neglected their duties by ignoring the signs that Ames was engaged in spying.

In contrast, when FBI agents failed to watch Edward Lee Howard carefully before he escaped to the Soviet Union, they were fired. Woolsey portrayed himself as a judge who had to take into account the rights of the CIA officers involved. He said no “misconduct” was involved. What was involved was gross negligence, something for which employees of private companies are routinely fired. In this case, the national security was at stake. The inspector general found Ames had compromised some thirty-six intelligence operations. Woolsey’s inaction meant that at the CIA, “It’s business as usual,” as Senator Dennis DeConcini, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, put it.