was placed in charge of the investigation, although it was given no priority. Ames was posted to Rome between 1986 and 1989, and did not have a very distinguished career. When he returned, he was assigned to the counterintelligence centre and was therefore able to pass Moscow all the details of the CIA’s actions against the KGB and then the SVR. Suspicions about his spending habits had been voiced and eventually a joint task force was set up with the FBI. The Bureau took over the case in May 1993 and arrested Ames in February 1994. (Ames’ handler Victor Cherkashin believes that Ames and later Robert Hanssen were actually betrayed by a CIA spy within the SVR.)
R. James Woolsey came in for a great deal of criticism over his attitude to the discovery — although verbal reprimands were issued to eleven key staff members (some of whom were retired), no one was fired over the Ames affair. However, the Senate Intelligence Committee called this response ‘seriously inadequate’ for a ‘disaster of unprecedented proportions’. Woolsey resigned in December 1994. He was replaced by Deputy Defence Secretary John Deutch, who continued Woolsey’s policy of declassifying documents relating to the Cold War, and trying to broaden the Agency’s personnel base with more women and minorities (a class action case had been brought against the Agency by various female employees during Woolsey’s time). For the first time since William Casey’s tenure, the DCI was a member of the cabinet, giving him more access to the president. He also brought in new management, in an effort to spring-clean the Agency.
The CIA’s public image suffered further during the mid-nineties when it was revealed that they were continuing to supply aid to Guatemalan military intelligence, despite an instruction in 1992 to sever ties, and were possibly complicit in the deaths of two Americans; this was seen as a continuation of now-outdated Cold War policies and further evidence that the Agency wasn’t moving with the times — as one former agent told
Other internal investigations launched by Deutch criticized the way in which material supplied by known double agents was passed up the chain of command, often without the relevant warnings attached. This practice was something that would come to haunt intelligence agencies in 2003 when the erroneous information regarding Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was given far more credence than it would have been had it been flagged correctly. Earlier operations against Saddam gave the Agency another knock when their spies in Northern Iraq, who had been trying to bring Kurdish and Iraqi dissidents together against Saddam, had to make a hasty exit in August 1996, leaving behind many of those who had trusted them. ‘It may be that the CIA actually made tremendous efforts to protect its people,’ a leading Iraqi expert said at the time, ‘but the perception among Iraqis is that having anything to do with Americans is dangerous to your health.’
In November 1996, another Russian spy was found in the CIA ranks. Harold James Nicholson was carrying exposed film and a computer disc with confidential Agency documents when he was arrested by the FBI. For the previous two years he had been working as a teacher at Camp Perry, known as ‘The Farm’, the Agency’s training centre for new agents; prior to that he had been posted to Kuala Lumpur, where he was turned by an FSB officer who Nicholson had claimed he was trying to persuade to work for the CIA — ironically around the time that Aldrich Ames was arrested. Nicholson’s motivation was financial — after he was seen trying to beat a standard polygraph test in 1995, the FBI began investigating his finances, and discovered large sums of money. He eventually pleaded guilty to receiving $180,000 from the Russians and to one specimen charge of espionage, although he had blown the cover of the agents passing through The Farm during his tenure there. Nicholson was a well-regarded agent and many at the Agency believed that he was on the way to becoming ‘a big spy’ for the Russians.
Around this time, the FBI discovered that they too were being betrayed to the Russians — although it wasn’t Robert Hanssen whose treachery had come to light. Earl Edwin Pitts, a senior agent, had contacted the KGB in 1987 when stationed in New York, and for the next five years passed documents to his handler, Rollan G. Dzheikiya. Unfortunately for Pitts, Dzheikiya defected after the fall of the Soviet Union, and became part of a sting operation run by the Bureau to capture Pitts. On his arrest in December 1996, the American claimed he was motivated by rage at the FBI, partly because of his low pay. An investigation into Pitts’ activities made some suspicious that the Russians must have another mole within the Bureau, since they never asked Pitts for anything major. Pitts himself suggested that Robert Hanssen might be a spy. Neither lead was properly followed up, and Hanssen remained undetected.
In a rare demonstration of cooperation between the FBI and the CIA, the two organizations worked together on a four-year manhunt for Aimal Kansi, who had killed two CIA employees outside Langley in 1993. He was eventually tracked down to Pakistan, whose administration allowed the joint task force agents to enter the country to capture him.
John Deutch resigned as DCI in December 1996, and was replaced by his deputy, George Tenet, who, unusually, remained in place after President George W. Bush succeeded President Clinton in 2000 — changes of party in the White House usually led to a new DCI. This provided an element of continuity when major changes were needed following 9/11. Tenet and the CIA would be accused of intelligence failures — and while the criticisms were justified, the Agency did far more in the build-up to 2001 than they have sometimes been given credit for. If information had been shared properly though in the three years before 9/11, the history of the first decade of the twenty-first century would have been very different.
14
THE WAR ON TERROR
It’s easy to be wise after the event. Everyone has 20/20 hindsight, and there has probably been more ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ regarding the work of the intelligence agencies in the years leading up to 11 September 2001 than any other event in recent history.
In June 2012, many of the key documents relating to what the CIA knew were finally released after a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive, a private business. These were referenced, but not quoted, in the 9/11 Commission’s Report, and, even in a heavily redacted form, show a trail of missed opportunities and interagency bickering that would have catastrophic consequences. Perhaps most worrying of all is the CIA’s own Inspector General report from August 2001, which praised the Counterterrorism Center’s performance for ‘coordinating national intelligence, providing warning, and promoting the effective use of Intelligence Community resources on terrorism issues’ and even noting that the relationship with the FBI was better than it had been in 1994 — mere days before that was conclusively proved to be false.
One of the biggest problems that the CIA and the other intelligence agencies faced when trying to deal with al-Qaeda was the religious fanaticism of its members, which meant it was far harder to infiltrate them. As Agency veteran Robert Dannenberg explained, al-Qaeda operatives weren’t like Soviet agents, who might be persuaded that the American way of life was better by showing them supermarkets ‘because they were driven by many of the same things that we’re driven by: success and taking care of our families’. They did get lucky early on though: Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, described by some as one of the founding members of al-Qaeda, walked into the US Embassy in Eritrea in spring 1996. He had embezzled $110,000 from al-Qaeda and was desperate to defect.
This came shortly after a designated bin Laden unit had been established within the CIA, the first time that the Agency had set up a group specifically to target one person or organization. This ‘virtual station’ operated out of Langley, and was run by Michael Scheuer, previously head of the CTC’s Islamic Extremist Branch, with a predominantly female team. From January 1996 onwards, their aim, according to DCI George Tenet, was ‘to track [bin Laden], collect intelligence on him, run operations against him, disrupt his finances, and warn policymakers about his activities and intentions’. Al-Fadl’s information gave them vital leads regarding al-Qaeda’s plans and hopes. SIGINT operations were put in motion; allies were sought. But even then, not everything was as smooth as it should have been: the NSA and CIA didn’t cooperate over jurisdictional issues.
Following the embassy bombings in 1998, Tenet significantly increased the attention on bin Laden. The CTC carried out a review of strategy, which led to Scheuer’s departure as unit leader and the development of a comprehensive plan of attack against al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, much as what was known as ‘The Plan’ called for a united campaign by the CIA, FBI, NSA and others, this didn’t happen in practice. FBI agents working with the CIA’s bin Laden unit were not allowed to pass relevant information back to the Bureau; the NSA left intercepts of phone calls to the FBI, fearful of going beyond their remit, but the Bureau didn’t obtain the phone records for those who
