Was Ames a mortal blow? - CIA spy Aldrich Ames - Editorial

National Review, July 31, 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

A legislator who is critically important on such questions as who gets U.S. funding managed a very brief exchange at an affair too noisy to permit fine conversational calibrations. He asked, ``Do you think the CIA can be saved?'' I murmured that I hoped so. He shook his head mournfully. ``I don't think so, not after Ames.''

The reference was to Aldrich Ames. Four books about his treachery were reviewed over the weekend in the New York Times and most of what was said was vaguely familiar, including that ten Russians were martyred at his dirty hands. Less prominent in the memory was the extraordinary behavior of CIA security. Ames disguised himself about as subtly as King Kong, but it seemed that there was nothing he could do blatant enough to attract the attention of the agency whose mission it is to protect the security of the United States and protect the friends of freedom who risk their lives by joining the resistance movement. During those days, 1985 - 91, Mr. Ames feared one thing. Not the CIA or the FBI or the OMB. He feared that friends of the men he was betraying, month after month, would notice the gory disappearance of a member of the resistance and advise Washington that obviously there had been a betrayal. One or two such signals did get through, but it occurred to nobody in charge at the CIA to rope in the alcoholic traitor even though he had become so carefree in his habit that he removed from Langley not discreet copies, but the original documents identifying our hidden friends in the Soviet Union. One recalls the trauma in Great Britain when they caught on to Kim Philby, the traitor who gleefully consigned to death any number of British patriots.

Eventually Philby wrote his memoirs, and the reviewer for the Daily Telegraph was Lord Birkenhead, gone to the House of Lords after a legendary record as a trial lawyer. Birkenhead wrote: ``We shall never know how many agents were killed or tortured as a result of Philby's work as a double agent. He is now safe in Russia, and we must, alas, abandon any wistful dream of seeing this little carrion gibbeted.'' Well, Ames isn't in Russia, but we don't hang our traitors. Nor, the authors of the Ames books advise us, do we do very much about those who made possible the extravagant treason of Ames. The question seriously arises whether the Agency itself can be rescued. The view is widely held that James Jesus Angleton was the dominant figure in the collapse of CIA security. This is ironic, because Angleton is associated with the sternest of views on security. He was an intellectual, a poet, a gourmet, an aesthete, and a very tough hombre. He had been a close friend of Kim Philby, and when he learned that Philby was a traitor, it affected his powers of reasoning. He became so suspicious, he thought almost every approach by a Russian official was a venture in double agentry. He approached me, on one occasion, requesting support for the publication of a book whose thesis was that the break between Moscow and Peking was a phony, concocted to conceal the ongoing Communist monolith. When he came to my house, the Russian author he desired me to meet, who came in a separate car, was given instructions on an order of exactitude I'd have been embarrassed to write into any of my spy novels. But whatever the causes of disrepair, one hopes that Congress will not go so far as to drop the CIA. Reforms are presumably needed, and were attempted by the Church Committee in 1975, but these were largely miscast, requiring a degree of intimacy between the Executive and the Legislative that is unrealistic. But the point is that continued intelligence is critical. Whether Mr. Deutsch, the new director of the CIA, can get the job done isn't known, though his credentials are good; and it is true that a job worth doing is worth doing even badly. Thanks to Mr. Ames, it may be another generation before a freedom-loving North Korean, Chinese, Iraqi, Iranian, or Libyan takes the risk of sending secrets for the benefit of the United States. But making the effort to penetrate to the secret designs and resources of such countries would appear to be a strategy more important, even, than an auto-da-fe over our mishandling of the traitor Ames.