Earley, Pete. Confessions
of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames. New York: Putnam's, 1997.
There are times when being last has its advantages. Four books
on the Ames case appeared in short order after the case broke and almost
two years later, Pete Earley weighs in with his contribution. Earley is
an established investigative reporter who had previously written the well-received
Family of Spies about the Walker Family spy ring. Rather than rush
to the press, Earley has taken plenty of time to gather information from
unexpected sources for this book.
The book looks at both sides of the case, Ames and the KGB on one
side, and the CIA on the other (the bulk of the counterintelligence story
lies with the CIA - the FBI contribution is only lightly touched upon.)
Entirely unprecedented is his, albeit limited and not overly cooperative,
access to former KGB sources. Earley also showed his investigative mettle
by subverting the Department of Justice bureaucracy to obtain several hours
of unsupervised interviews with Ames. After his subterfuge was tumbled to,
and Ames was removed to a remote prison, the two continued an extensive
written correspondence. Even the CIA eventually proved cooperative and gave
him access to the counterintelligence team that unmasked Ames. Earley has
taken these new sources, fused them with what has already become public
knowledge, and has written a highly readable book that fills in some of
the gaps in the story of Ames.
One of the most important questions about this book is whether
or not Ames is telling the truth. The answer seems to be that he is, but
only up to a point. It does not seem that he then starts lying, but tells
the story to put himself in the best possible light. Ames will never be
outside prison walls again, so he has plenty of time for self-examination
and self criticism. Rather than do this, he seems to have taken to indulging
in self-delusion.
After so many years of leading a double life, Ames developed a
solution of separating his mind into compartments to cope with his deception.
This is similar to what Klaus Fuchs described inaccurately as his "controlled
schizophrenia." After he had been looking at the world from two different
perspectives for so long, did Ames allow the perspective he found more convenient
to take over? Inconsistencies do appear, for example: how much did Ames
tell the KGB at the first meeting? Ames says he only told them enough to
make things interesting, the KGB says he more or less told them everything
- naming a large number of human sources and compromising two major technical
collection operations. The resolution of these inconsistencies seems more
often to be with Ames being reticent or indulging in self-deception than
with his lying to the reader.
Ames himself dominates the first part of the book, which starts,
as is typical with books about traitors, with the family tree. With Ames,
there is no need to go beyond his father: a competent academic who became
an undistinguished intelligence officer. The first words from Ames in the
book are about his early life, and here he really does add some new depth
to the story. Ames the elder appears to have been a decent man who tried
to instill standards and a respect for the truth in his children; however,
his poor performance at the CIA contributed to a withdrawal into an alcoholic
isolation.
Ames the younger was unsettled in his college years, almost completing
a degree in theater before taking to a period of wandering. He finally completed
his studies when a degree became necessary to move from an internship to
a career CIA officer. He was to claim that his theater training was a great
help in recruiting and that he was a successful recruiter. This appears
to be one of his exercises in self-delusion because he does not produce
any evidence of his recruitments, except for two low-level ones in Turkey
during his first unsuccessful overseas tour.
At about this point, Earley relinquishes control to Ames for a
stretch as he spends a few chapters trying to explain his career and to
explore the wellsprings of his disaffection. One of the sources was a cable
from the then Soviet ambassador to the US, Anatoly Dobrynin, to the Kremlin
describing a conversation with outgoing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger appears to have given a detailed description to Dobrynin of how
to get the better of his successor (Cyrus Vance) in the upcoming SALT II
negotiations. If true, this would be tantamount to treason. Earley was not
able to prove or disprove the story, despite a great deal of effort. Did
Kissinger commit treason, or did Dobrynin conflate off-the-cuff remarks
from Kissinger? Perhaps Ames fell for a Soviet disinformation exercise,
perhaps he stopped telling the story when it suited his purpose.
Further rough waters are encountered when Ames attempts, unconvincingly,
to link the betrayal of Ogorodnik (the CIA source who supplied the Dobrynin
cable) to Karl Kocher - the Czech penetration agent. The whole effort falls
flat and says more about Ames' credulity than his credibility. Earley later
accepts the story uncritically. Ames further indulges in the classical demonology
of the CIA, using the eminence grise of Angleton as the bete noire, by going
over some hoary old stories: Angleton jailed Nosenko (he didn't), and was
responsible for the exposure of the sources FEDORA and TOPHAT (producing
no evidence beyond office gossip). Ames tries to justify his actions as
a response to CIA misdeeds, but does not convince. The effort seems to be
little more than a recitation of the folk history of the CIA, as if trying
to convince the doctrinaire anti-CIA crowd that he is really one of theirs.
In between these episodes, Ames fills us in on his career. The
broad outline is well-known and Ames' own words again help to flesh out
the story. Although often unconvincing when trying to justify his treason,
one does feel reasonably convinced that he was really quite good at some
parts of being a case officer. In particular, he seemed to have been effective
at managing the troubled spirits of Soviet assets. It is possible that the
earlier books on Ames underplayed this ability of his. Even at a late stage
in his career, he went to bat for one of his older Soviet sources. The CIA
had decided to drop him because they believed he was a double agent. In
one of the more bizarre reflections in the wilderness of mirrors, Ames was
confident enough of the innocence of the man, Sergei Fedorenko, to help
get his escrowed CIA payments released and to get the FBI to take him on
as a defector.
Ames' first marriage had been rocky since his wife had to resign
from the CIA to accompany him on his first overseas tour and it eventually
ended after Ames met Rosario during an unaccompanied tour in Mexico. The
end of the marriage, with a whimper rather than a bang, shows us some of
the stresses placed on the personal life of a Clandestine Services officer.
There is a little too much wallowing in pop psychology in Ames' search for
explanations. This indulgence is a recurring problem, serving more to muddle
than to enlighten. It was the financial strains arising from the divorce
and the divorce settlement that drove Ames to betray his country rather
than go to a financial advisor.
When Ames begins to justify his decision, he starts looking for
some higher purpose on one hand, and to minimize the damage he did on the
other. Using the concatenation of popular mythology and self-delusion, he
tries to convince the reader that he was doing the right thing. At one point
he comes up with the following:
"A lot of barriers that should have stopped me from betraying my country were gone. The first barrier was [the idea] that political intelligence matters.... On a tactical level, yes, good intelligence matters. If TRIGON had told us that the Kremlin was about to start a war, of course that would have been important."
On the one hand, Ames seems to be saying that it wasn't his fault,
but on the other, he fails to recognize that without a TRIGON, the warning
may never have been sent because he had betrayed those sources.
Ames goes on to claim that US national security was never endangered,
but forgets that one of the sources he betrayed - Gordievsky - relayed intelligence
of such political and strategic importance that it did little short of preventing
a nuclear war and caused a major shift in US and British approaches to the
USSR. (Ames also claims that he gave the KGB Gordievsky's name.) Similarly,
he claims that the US was "not at war, despite the decades of hype
and lies." In the most pedantic sense, this may be true. In a broader
sense, it is downright wrong. The ideological struggle with the Soviet Union
was as intense as it had ever been with several proxy wars at various stages.
Any moderately alert student of history has noticed how easily the transition
from firing words to firing weapons can be made.
An obligatory layer about the corruption of US power in general
and of the CIA in particular is applied, but Ames fails to notice that in
his own corruption that he could live the American dream on the backs of
those he betrayed. His admission that he betrayed these people for money
does nothing to mitigate his actions. That it was his own greed that finally
led to his arrest is only just. Even in the limited statements from Ames
in the earlier books, he came across as politically naive. Earley gives
him the chance to redress things, but he fails to take it.
At one point, he seems to be making a plea for sympathy, as if
claiming that he did not get a fair shake. He quotes Sir Francis Walsingham
about hiring some "low fellow" to spy and concludes from it that
"all of us detest a traitor, no matter how he sugar coats his treason
or justifies his betrayal." I was always of the opinion that we detested
those who betray us. We may have our reasonable concerns about those who
spy for us, but detestation is surely not the dominant emotion. Gratitude
must rank at least as high, and surely there can even be some admiration,
not only for the courage of Polyakov or Kuklinski, but also for the Abel
or Philby who conducted himself so well for the Other Side?
When Earley takes control again, the book concentrates on the counterintelligence
investigation. One of the most overlooked aspects of the case is that Ames
was the first American spying for the Soviets to be caught without help
from a Soviet source. This is Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
brought to life. The Ames case has a lot in common with many earlier espionage
cases and there are many unintentional allusions to them throughout the
book. Unlike the cozy confines of the Circus, where the spy could be caught
in a few weeks by a lone George Smiley in a hotel room with some purloined
files, the sprawling Directorate of Operations occupied a team of five for
several years. Their job was not made any easier by reorganizations, reassignments,
and a lack of interest and encouragement from the new senior management.
The losses caused by Ames did not actually happen overnight, but
over several months. It took some time to conclude that something systemic
may be wrong. The first investigation by the then-outgoing CIA Inspector-General
concluded that there was no underlying problem causing the losses. A communications
security problem was seen as the most likely reason. The KGB did run a disinformation
operation suggesting that CIA communications had been compromised. It took
several months to disprove this idea. By the time this had been done, the
morass of Iran-Contra had more or less paralyzed senior management at Langley.
Later in the book, we find out that one of the CIA sources in Moscow (PROLOGUE)
was a double agent using information gleaned from interrogations to build
a deceptive case for the effectiveness of the KGB, and to successfully misdirect
the CIA.
Once the KGB money started flowing, Ames, now married to Rosario,
began to enjoy the good life during his posting to Rome. In doing so, they
managed to alienate a large part of the embassy staff and Ames collected
a poor fitness report. The double life again placed a strain upon Ames and
upon the marriage. Rosario Ames comes across as even more of a harridan
in this book than in the earlier ones. It was in Rome that he learned that
all of the sources he had betrayed had been arrested. Even though he was
disturbed by this, it did not stop him handing over further names and a
stack of cables or setting up the pair of Swiss bank accounts and the eight
bank accounts in the US that he used to launder his payments from the KGB.
As the investigation at Langley was maneuvering slowly through
the paralysis imposed by Iran-Contra whilst also carrying the burden of
the legacy of Angleton's misfired investigations, the Soviets were already
throwing plenty of hardware into the works. Not only were they continuing
with the communications security and PROLOGUE disinformation operations,
they were also playing Clayton Lonetree affair for all it was worth. Lonetree
was the Marine guard at the Moscow embassy who had been seduced by a female
KGB agent and was believed to have let the KGB into the embassy at night.
Imaginations ran riot at the possibilities.
According to Earley's interviews with the KGB, they were looking
for a propaganda coup by inducing Lonetree, a Native American, to defect.
Even so, investigating the affair and elimination of the possibility took
a good part of a year and the team fell victim to the change of management
and the reorganizations brought about by the superseding of Casey by William
Webster as DCI and the formation of the joint CIA-FBI Counterintelligence
Center. This left only one Office of Security investigator to keep the case
alive. He was on the right track when he decided that looking for the money
was the best way to trap the mole, although his first suspect was entirely
innocent.
Aldrich and Rosario were remarkably generous in leaving a trail.
Eventually one of Ames' coworkers became suspicious about the sources of
their income and, after wrestling with her conscience, reported her suspicions
to a former member of the team. This episode recalls Graham Greene's foreword
to Kim Philby's memoir, My Silent War, in which he opines that it
is better to betray a country than a friend. This proved (eventually) to
be the break the case needed and the rest is history. The errors and omissions
that plagued the case, and that have recently been criticized again by a
governmental inquiry, are covered just as well as in the other books. The
words of those directly involved help us to better understand what happened
and to remind us that the whole case was a human drama.
More than this, Earley shows us that the case was one involving
human casualties. Many of the chapters have a coda of extended quotes from
the interviews with Ames. Some chapters also end with quotes from friends
and colleagues of Ames, and survivors of those he betrayed. These words
of fathers, wives and children are often bitter and sorrowful, uncomprehending
of what happened. They are a harsh counterpoint to Ames' emolient self-justification.