Convicted spy Aldrich Ames was a bumbling, buffoonish secret agent who had more in common with Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clousseau than James Bond or George Smiley, according to a declassified Senate Intelligence Committee report made public Tuesday.
The 150-page report on the worst spy scandal in CIA history includes an account of Ames’ accidentally leaving a briefcase with information about a Russian undercover agent on a New York subway.
Committee Chairman Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) said the report “paints a picture which will come as a shock to most Americans” and one that warrants CIA Director James Woolsey’s replacement if he doesn’t take recommended steps to reform the agency soon.
The Intelligence Committee, which spent eight months investigating the case, accused the CIA of “gross negligence” from beginning to end.
DeConcini said there are 23 agency officials who bear responsibility for the Ames debacle, but the only disciplinary action taken by Woolsey was to issue letters of reprimand to 11, seven of whom are retired.
“I believe my decisions were fair and just,” Woolsey said Tuesday at a news conference in Pittsburgh. “We should put cases and decisions behind us and move on to the challenges of managing counterintelligence.”
According to the report, Ames told the committee in a jailhouse interview that a career selling life-and-death secrets to the Russians began in April 1985 when he strolled into the Soviet Embassy in Washington and left a note with his name and CIA title on it.
He said he gave the Soviets all his most valuable information at the outset of his treachery without any specific request for money in return. Eventually, he got tens of thousands of dollars in cash payments.
Though the Soviets began executing and imprisoning CIA operatives behind the Iron Curtain soon after Ames identified them, the agency didn’t get around to checking on Ames for six years.
Ames was kept on the job even though he was a notorious heavy drinker who slept off liquid lunches at his desk, the report said.
Ames, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, told committee interrogators he stayed at work late and routinely downloaded classified information from agency computer files and stuffed his briefcase full of classified documents.
The report said former CIA Directors William Casey, William Webster and Robert Gates and former acting CIA Director Richard Kerr-who were in charge of the agency from 1986 to 1991, “must ultimately bear the responsibility for the lack of an adequate investigative response.”
In their report, DeConcini, Vice Chairman John Warner (R-Va.) and the 15 other Intelligence Committee members recommended two dozen major changes in CIA operations and procedures.
These include firing personnel with chronic drinking problems, conducting background checks on people with compromising and continuing personal problems, searching staff leaving and entering CIA premises and ending heavy reliance on polygraph tests, which Ames boasted of beating twice.
These and other proposals for reforming the agency will be taken up by a presidential panel to be appointed this month.
Accompanying the committee report was a transcript of an interview with Ames last Aug. 5.
Ames said that, after receiving an initial payment of $50,000 from the Soviets, he “gathered up from my desk documents, cables, traffic . . . reflecting virtually all of the most important cases that we had and gave it to them with no preconditions.
“I said nothing about, you know, give me more money or what to do. I just said here (are) . . . virtually all of our intelligence officer cases, GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) officers, KGB officers all around the world.”
Though he never gave them information of such value again, the Soviets and later Russian intelligence officials continued to pay him and at one point informed him in a written note that they had set aside $2 million for him.
He said that during the years he was stationed in Rome, he would take original classified documents out of CIA offices in shopping bags, then meet with his Soviet controller over drinks and exchange his bags of documents for bags of money. He routinely would fly to Switzerland to deposit large sums of cash in unnumbered bank accounts taken out in his own name-all without the CIA ever noticing.
The report said the Ames case showed the CIA is “a system and a culture unwilling and unable to face, assess and investigate the catastrophic blow Ames had dealt to the core of its operations.”
Ames disclosed that he almost got into trouble for a bumbling episode that had nothing to do with his treachery.
While stationed in Washington, he had one or two meetings a month at a safe house in the Bronx with a Russian agent doing intelligence work for the CIA in New York. Ames customarily carried documents used in debriefing the Russian agent in the false bottom of a briefcase.
Once, tired from an Amtrak ride from Washington, he realized after getting on a New York City subway headed to the Bronx that he needed batteries for his tape recorder.
“So I jumped out of the subway and went in and I bought the batteries,” he said, “and then I realized I left my briefcase!”
He went to the safe house and called the CIA’s New York office.
“We were worried to death because the reason the safe house was up in the Bronx was because the Soviet residential complex was nearby,” he said.
“I went back down to the base chief’s apartment. They were waiting for me along with a couple of guys from the (FBI). We were drafting a little ad to go down in the bottom of the front page of The New York Times. And while we were doing that, we got a call from the bureau. A school teacher in Queens had found this briefcase and called the FBI.”
