Mole unearthed but still free

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 22, 1997 | by Jamie Dettmer

Counterintelligence officers from the CIA and the FBI identified a major Langley-based, Moscow-run mole several months ago but have been unable to secure enough evidence to prosecute the spy, news alert! has learned.

According to CIA and congressional sources, the suspected mole -- he holds GS- 1 5 pay grade -- was suspended 10 months ago. The sources say he has been confronted several times by counterintelligence officers and interrogated but denies any wrongdoing. It isn't known if he was subjected to polygraph tests or, if he was, whether he failed them -- although, on their own, remarks identified as lies by a polygraph wouldn't be enough to secure a conviction -- let alone serve as the basis for prosecution.

The probe, which is continuing, partly was triggered by persistent claims from Russian defectors that the agency had not solved a Moscow-directed penetration problem when it unmasked Aldrich Ames as a KGB mole in February 1994. Even before Ames was caught, defectors warned their American debriefers that Langley had more than one Russian-run mole working in the CIA's ranks. The defectors' claims -- some were made as long ago as the late 1980s -- were not well-received by a disbelieving CIA, Langley sources say, and there was little follow-up of the warnings.

However, since CIA turncoat Ames was unmasked -- and since the subsequent widespread criticism of the agency for failing to detect him earlier -- the agency has been more vigilant on the counterespionage front. After the agency and FBI spycatchers were damned in a classified 400-page report on the Ames case by the Justice Department's inspector general, Michael Bromwich, Langley and the FBI instituted a beefed-up program of counterespionage checks. Those checks and improved cooperation between the CIA and the FBI are credited with having helped secure the arrest and guilty plea earlier this year of former CIA station chief Harold J. Nicholson on charges of spying for Russia.

It isn't known whether the improved cooperation between the FBI and the CIA helped in identifying this latest mole. But news alert! understands that several defectors who left Russian in-telligence agencies in the early 1990s have been put through debriefings again about what they know of Moscow's penetration of the CIA.

Capitol Hill sources say that the chairmen and ranking minority members of congressional intelligence committees have been briefed by CIA Director George Tenet on the progress of the probe. "This is a hot one," says a congressional source.

The suspected mole is believed to be a case officer who has worked on several desks during his career in the CIA's Directorate of Operations. Agency sources say he was recruited several years ago by the KGB and chose to continue to work for Moscow when the Cold War ended and the KGB's foreign operations were handed over to a new spy organization, the SVRR.

The unmasking of yet another mole at Langley won't help lift morale at the troubled agency Since the end of the Cold War the CIA has suffered a seemingly endless flow of embarrassments, and this latest case would suggest the rot hasn't been stopped. A CIA spokesman "declined to comment."