Christopher Andrew and Vassili Mitrokhine
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Aldrich Ames, who approached the KGB offering his services in 1985, had worked for the CIA for eighteen years. In the space of two months he would betray twenty agents working in the West (especially in the US), including Dmitri Polyakov, a general in the GRU who worked for both the FBI and CIA for over twenty years. He also gave up AdolfTolkachev, an electronics specialist who had provided excellent information on Soviet avionics, as well as at least eleven KGB and GRU agents around the world, the majority of which would be shot. Together, these agents were part of the most successful infiltration of the Soviet Union by the West since the Bolshevik Revolution. Greed was the main motivation behind Ames’ actions and after his arrest nine years later, he had already received nearly $3m (probably a record in the history of Soviet espionage) from the KGB and its successor, with a further $2m still promised to him.
Not all the American spies given up by Ames were arrested and at least two were able to escape. One of them, a KGB officer stationed in Athens, was suddenly recalled to Moscow on the pretention that his son was seriously ill. Doubting that this was true, the man contacted the CIA representative in Athens and managed to flee to the United States. The other agent to escape the net was Oleg Gordievsky, whose story is discussed at the end of this chapter.
When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, there were no fundamental changes to the nature of espionage, although official contact was made for the first time in 1987 between the head of the KGB, Kryuchkov, and the heads of the CIA. The intention behind this was to coordinate actions in a number of areas, such as drugs and terrorism. However, when Kryuchkov came to the United States to meet with his American counterparts, he must have been laughing up his sleeve, fully aware that the CIA had been infiltrated at the highest level by its own agents!
In the West, the intelligence agencies were quick to let go any spies who were no longer in contact, no doubt the result of them being exposed or arrested.What especially troubled the CIA, however, was the simultaneity of the arrests and the Soviets had no doubt made an error in making the joint arrests. Yet it was not the KGB's decision to do so, but Gorbachev who had personally given the order to arrest the spies who were at risk of exposing their mole, Aldrich Ames. Paradoxically, he was right: the CIA initially was convinced it had a mole in its midst and made a list of the 200 agents who would have access to the files of those spies stationed in the East. Among one of the more prominent names on the list was that of Aldrich Ames. This was not the first time he had come under suspicion and yet each time before he had managed to get away with it - even successfully beating the lie detector on two occasions.
Thousands of records were scrutinised by CIA agents. However, and this is the paradox of the whole affair, as the head of counterintelligence, Ames also found himself on the side of the investigators and so could easily escape any traps he risked falling into. He was thus able to continue with his dirty work, along with the one or two others who were protecting or manipulating him.
And so the investigation into the mysterious mole failed, although there were still those in the CIA who wanted to take it further, even suggesting a thorough investigation into the financial situations of all the suspects, in order to see whether or not they had received any secret ‘donations'. However, an important figure in the CIA objected to this, on the grounds that it would violate the rights of those agents involved, before observing that by continuing to hunt the alleged mole, there was a risk of resurrecting the witch hunt climates of the 1960s and 1970s, which at the time had profoundly weakened the agency. The fact remains that if these financial investigations had been carried out, then Aldrich Ames could well have been exposed as he would no doubt have been unable to justify the dramatic improvement in his lifestyle.
The objector also persuaded the best brains of the CIA to give up on their hunt for the mole on the following grounds: if the Soviets had conducted this series of simultaneous arrests, it was no doubt as a result of information obtained from a mole within the CIA,. However, they would not have taken such a risk if the mole was still active in case the mole in question was unmasked. The conclusion must therefore be that the mole was no longer operational and so the counterintelligence agents began to search through the files of traitors who had already been identified, such as those who had been denounced by the defector, Yurchenko.116 One of these men had already managed to escape back to the USSR, so perhaps it was he who was behind the wave of arrests in Moscow. Consequently, the search for the mole was temporarily abandoned, which is why, ironically, Gorbachev was right to order the mass arrests of all American spies.
This high-ranking and persuasive CIA objector can only have been the mysterious protector behind Aldrich Ames: a super-spy who has never been revealed and today enjoys a peaceful existence somewhere in Europe, having had a brilliant career as the head of the CIA, especially thanks to his Soviet friends. Yet the activities of this CIA mole did not end with the denunciation of the spies in Moscow: he was also responsible for the failure of dozens of CIA operations and also participated in several cases of providing
