The KGB Defectors
... a summer jobs program that the agency offered exclusively for its employees’ children. After being hired, Ames worked in the camp in a position where he helped make fake money used in training exercises at the CIA’s secret training facility, “the Farm”. After he graduated, Ames attended the University of Chicago but spent so much time working in the drama club there on plays that he flunked out. By his father’s suggestion, the CIA hired him in February of 1962, providing that he attend college classes at night. In his CIA training, Ames discovered this job to be a perfect fit with his interest in drama, as he quoted in an interview with Peter Earley, “You were told that you were now part of an elite service, and that your job was paramount to the very survival of the United States. Because of these things, you were entitled to lie, cheat, deceive. You could operate in disguise, be anyone you wished.” (Earley 56). Ames finished training second in the class, and was soon assigned his first job, a case officer in the Directorate of Operations, the CIA’s covert branch. For Ames’s second post, the CIA assigned him to its Soviet division and sent him to Ankara, Turkey, where he posed as a military officer. His job was to recruit Turks as spies, but he was unsuccessful, only recruiting one person, a local beauty pageant contestant whose boyfriend was involved in a revolutionary group trying to overturn the Turkish government. When he returned to Washington in 1972, his supervisor declared that Ames was no good at recruiting spies, and thus never let Ames be a recruiting officer again. Although Ames considered quitting, the agency sent him to its foreign language school where he found he had aptitude for Russian, and quickly became fluent. Due to his skill in the Russian language, Ames was soon put in charge of being the correspondent (spy handler) for KGB moles for the CIA. Ames was very successful in his duty as a correspondent, handling such spies as Alexander Dmitrievich Ogorodnik, Sergei Fedorenko, and Ambassador Arkady Nikolaevich Shevchenko, who contributed information mainly on the inner workings of the Soviet government and it’s scientific branches. Ames grew bitter after being passed over for various promotions. Ames’s personal life was also becoming a burden as Ames began to fight with his wife. Feeling that both his personal and professional life were in a wreck, Ames fell into depression until he met Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, the cultural attaché for the Colombian Embassy in Mexico; the two quickly became lovers. In September 1983, Ames finally received a promotion and was named Counterintelligence Branch Chief in Soviet Operations, a job that would give him access to nearly all of the agency’s Soviet cases, including the names of all of the CIA’s spies in the Soviet Union. In 1983, Ames divorced his wife Nan, and married Rosario, whose lifestyle, Ames figured would cost twice his CIA salary to maintain. Knowing that he needed to find a way to make more money, Ames thought of a man he knew who had spied for the KGB and received $50,000 for his information. Figuring that the $50,000 was about what he needed to sustain his new lifestyle, Ames decided to follow this course. After contacting the Soviet Union, Ames started spying for the KGB in 1984 under the pseudonym Rick Wells. Ames first contacted the KGB in January 1984 with a letter addressed to Victor Cherkashin, the KGB rezident (top ranking official) in the Soviet embassy in Washington DC. The letter betrayed two CIA moles in the KGB, Valery F. Martynov and Sergei M. Motorin. The KGB hired Ames to be an official “asset” in February of 1984, guaranteeing $50,000 with a base weekly salary of $4,000. “or about a year Ames spied for the KGB without garnering CIA attention as the CIA believed that their spies were double agents, secretly retaining their loyalty to the USSR and reporting back to the KGB the information they found about the CIA” (Weiner, Johnston, Lewis 67). The US started investigating the situation in 1985, when spies in the KGB for the US started to be incarcerated and executed frequently. The US was close to discovering Ames’s involvement until a KGB officer, Vitaly Yurchenko, defected to the CIA in the same year. Vitaly S. Yurchenko, a high-ranking KGB colonel defected to the CIA in July 1985, and swiftly redefected to the KGB three months later in November. Theories suggest that Yurchenko’s defection was a setup by the KGB to take the CIA’s eyes off of Ames, however the truth of the matter is, according to Victor Cherkashin, Yurchenko’s superior, in his book Spy Handler, was just the opposite, the KGB was deathly afraid of Yurchenko knowing about Ames and surrendering him to the CIA. Yurchenko, to the gratefulness of the KGB, did not know about Ames’s deception. “Due partly to the flawless execution of our plan to influence the US public, and also by giving the CIA names of former and current moles in their organization (which made the CIA believe that those officers were behind the betrayals) Yurchenko took US eyes off of Ames.” (Cherkashin 259) Ames remained undiscovered for the rest of the Soviet Union’s existence; he served the KGB until their disbandment in October 1991. Over that time period, Ames betrayed a total of twenty-five moles in the KGB serving the CIA, Polyakov being the highest ranking mole betrayed. After the investigation was finished, Ames was arrested and charged of treason in 1994. Ames pleaded guilty to treason and various forms of espionage and was sentenced to death at his trial The officers Ames betrayed while possibly not all of the CIA moles, were significant enough to effectively shut down the communication of classified KGB information being fed to the CIA. The three most important officers Ames betrayed were Dmitri Polyakov, KGB Lieutenant Colonel Gennady Varennik and Sergei Fedorenko, whom Ames had handled in the KGB years before. Polyakov, a general in and the KGB liaison with the Soviet Air Defense Command, had provided the CIA with top-secret documents and inside information on the USSR’s air force and the KGB’s involvement with the same. Varennik, the KGB rezident in Vienna and Bonn, and parlayed the KGB’s activities in those areas to the CIA. Varennik was also credited with warning the CIA that the KGB planned to bomb the US embassy in Germany, due to a violation of a treaty that had been in place concerning Germany, an event which was averted due to Varennik’s information. Fedorenko, a nuclear arms expert assigned to the Soviet United Nation delegation, disclosed key missile information and crucial details about Soviet procurement practices. The agents Ames betrayed possessed wide-ranged information which had been crucial in the secret war between the CIA and the KGB, by taking those agents away from the CIA, Ames literally shut down the CIA’s “eyes and ears” in the KGB. The FBI version of Ames, or the man who effectively shut down the FBI’s links to the KGB was Robert Hanssen. Hanssen did not have access to the same form of information Ames did, but his information, in its usefulness to the KGB, rivaled Ames’s. “Ames is termed the deadliest spy ever in US history, however, Hanssen did more damage to his organization and thus grew more important to the KGB than Ames” (Shannon, Blackman 18). Hanssen, like Ames, was a down-on-his-luck FBI officer, who was in debt and needed money, Hanssen, like Ames decided that the best way to get that money was through becoming a mole in the FBI for the KGB. During more than 15 years of betrayal, the FBI maintains that Hanssen gave the Soviets, and later the Russians, 6,000 pages of documents and 27 computer diskettes cataloguing secret and top secret programs. Hanssen exposed government projects including the National Measurement and Signature Intelligence Program, involving acoustic intelligence, radar intelligence and nuclear radiation detection, the FBI Double Agent Program, the Intelligence Community's Comprehensive Compendium of Future Intelligence Requirements, a study on recruitment operations of the KGB against the CIA, an assessment of the KGB's effort to gather information on U.S. nuclear programs, a CIA analysis of the KGB's First Chief Directorate (FCD), its international intelligence division, and FBI counterintelligence techniques, sources, methods and operations. Hanssen also tipped off the KBG to the FBI's secret investigation of Felix Bloch, an agent suspected of spying for Moscow in 1989. The KGB warned Bloch, Bloch took heed to the warnings and Justice Department prosecutors were never able to find key evidence that Bloch passed secret documents. Hanssen wrote a total of 27 letters to the Russian...