The future of intelligence

National Interest, The, Winter, 1994 by Abram N. Shulsky, Gary J. Schmitt

WITHIN HOURS OF the arrest of CIA officer Aldrich Ames for espionage, unnamed agency officials were telling reporters that Ames was a drunk and a mediocre case officer. In the weeks that followed, former superiors and fellow officers described him as inept, dull, unsophisticated and lackadaisical. The comments were not surprising. Agency employees wanted to distance themselves from the alleged traitor in their midst, and so were quick to point out that Ames was neither well regarded nor typical of the caliber of personnel within the CIA component that handled clandestine human intelligence activity, the Directorate of Operations.

What was typical, however, was the nonchalance with which an officer of Ames' low caliber was allowed to proceed from job to job within the operations directorate, without anyone in a managerial position seeming to focus on the fact that the organization had a problem on its hands. As the agency's inspector general subsequently noted, Ames was "not going anywhere and no one cared."

Nevertheless, CIA comments at the time of Ames' arrest are revealing. After all, the officer whom the anonymous agency sources were trashing (and had been judged by the CIA at one point to be the third-worst officer among two hundred at his rank) had been only a few years before entrusted with one of the most sensitive posts within the intelligence community--chief of the counterintelligence branch of the Soviet-East European division of the operations directorate. The damage he could and did do to U.S. and allied intelligence operations in the Soviet Union was immense.(1) That the agency was willing to give Ames this position says as much about how important the CIA considers counterintelligence as any stack of pronouncements to the contrary from a succession of directors of central intelligence.

Of course, this is not news. For twenty years, since the forced retirement in 1974 of James Angleton, long-time chief of the agency's counterintelligence staff, counterintelligence (or CI) has been a subordinate discipline at Langley, occasionally called upon but generally reviled and ignored. A Capitol Hill staffer had an occasion to learn about this view first hand some years ago, in the course of explaining to an operations officer a bit of Machiavellian maneuvering going on in Congress. With a big smile on his face, and with a professional comic's sense of timing, the officer replied, "You know, you have a CI mentality...and where I come from, that is not a compliment."

The cost of this contempt came high. We now know that virtually all East German and Cuban spies recruited by the agency for more than a decade were in fact double agents, controlled by those states' intelligence services. In the absence of an effective, in-house counterintelligence capability to review and challenge these recruitments, the CIA was manipulated by the Cuban and East German services, which fed the agency inconsequential, or perhaps even deliberately deceptive, reports.

Paradoxically, against this background (but only against this background), the handling of the Ames case reflects somewhat more credit on the agency than has been recognized. After a succession of its agents had been "rolled up" by the KGB in the mid-1980s, the leadership of the CIA's operations directorate knew it had a serious problem and began an investigation. But the question was, how, precisely, were its operations being compromised? Was it connected to the treachery and subsequent defection of ex-CIA officer Edward Lee Howard, to the lapse of embassy security associated with the Marine Guard scandal in Moscow, to a compromise of a communication channel used by U.S. intelligence, or perhaps a bit of each? Or was it any clandestine service's worst nightmare, a mole?

Investigating the possible causes and eliminating those which do not pan out is the heart of the counterintelligence effort in such instances. A major complication in investigating the mole possibility was the (absurd) fact that initially some two hundred individuals were thought to have had access to the information associated with the failed operations. In addition, the pattern of failures was not continuous. Although, in retrospect, the pattern strongly suggested a mole whose access varied over time--as Ames' did--its significance could only be grasped in retrospect.(2)

That said, the CIA's effort to get to the bottom of its losses was nevertheless, according to the inspector general's review, marked by "almost complete indifference" on the part of the agency's leadership. This indifference, combined with the fact that investigators lacked resources and that their efforts were bureaucratically splintered between the agency's Counterintelligence Center, the Office of Security and the Soviet-East European Division, meant that the molehunt would inevitably turn into the tragic comedy of errors that it became. Ames, by any measure of the clandestine art, was a buffoon. Yet, for nearly a decade, he escaped arrest.