I had a friend, a Soviet-East Europe Division case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency who served in Moscow in the 1980s. He was extremely well-suited to operations behind the Iron Curtain: He had a preternatural capacity to know where he was even in areas of Moscow he’d never been to. Maps and photographs once seen were never forgotten, giving him a continuous visual feed as he ran endurance contests against the omnipresent possibility of KGB surveillance. After a few runs, something dawned on him: His agent never made mistakes in his clandestine communications and routines. Everything was perfect.
Over time, he became convinced he now had a doubled agent. He also began to suspect that Langley had a mole. How to relay that information back to headquarters posed a problem, one that he never overcame. He threw the dice with one senior officer in the station, who strongly advised him to keep his suspicions to himself. While in Moscow, he did so.
His suspicions were probably Aldrich Ames in action. On January 5, Ames passed away in prison, surely in a lot less agony than the CIA agents whom he revealed to Soviet intelligence. As is well known now, the Directorate of Operations didn’t want to deal with the hideous possibility that one of its own had betrayed probably the most consequential assets the CIA ever had inside the Soviet Union. It certainly didn’t want to envision the possibility that a man once responsible for overseeing counterintelligence against the Soviets was a traitor.
I met Ames only once. It was a short, pleasant encounter. I had friends who served with him and liked him. He had a sense of humor. He could be biting and accurate in his critique of the clandestine service’s many flaws. He was literate, and, according to others, wrote above-average cables. He liked to drink a lot, as did many case officers of his generation. There were a lot of red flags that should have been seen but weren’t, as there often are when we discover that an American has decided to work with a foreign intelligence service. I briefly lived above an American official in Istanbul who later turned out to be a mole for an East Bloc service. I, my wife, and the regional security officer in the consulate all knew that the gentleman was seriously "off." We even speculated he would be an excellent person for an intel or security service to target. We congratulated and kicked ourselves later—even though there was absolutely nothing about him then that we could observe that would have merited an intrusive counterespionage investigation—when he was arrested.
Assessing who might betray their oaths of office is ultimately a profoundly subjective guessing game; catching someone who is already working for a foreign intelligence service is more inductive—once you understand that there is a problem. But for every defense there is perhaps a better offense. Scanning bank accounts today, for example, can be deeply unrewarding since there are now so many ways to move money, and if the foreign intelligence service can keep its assets financially disciplined—sometimes not an easy task—catching a spy, as opposed to building a legal case against someone you already know has gone bad, isn’t a question of just doing the arithmetic.
And there is the unavoidable, little counterespionage problem that the folks who choose to work in the field often aren’t the brightest lights in their organizations. They don’t need to be if catching someone is just about doing the math, about seeing that debits far exceed observable credits. But scanning an organization for undiscovered spies is like trying to find a needle in a hay stack, especially if the reasons for the treason are more psychological than financial. Americans often don’t handle these truths particularly well since they are so relentlessly bureaucratic in everything they do. Americans want to believe there are procedures, if we only followed them energetically, that would reveal the bastards within. The "truth" is a cold hard fact that bureaucrats can find.
Americans love "objective" procedures for grading each other; they gravitate toward similar "objective" means to find individuals who are bad risks or moles. The polygraph is one of the oldest American methods of trying to do this. It’s not without value: An astonishing number of Americans will confess the most personal things to strangers when strapped up to this machine. I used to laugh, as discreetly as I could, when Langley’s polygraphers would be deployed against Iranian assets. The "truth" is deeply, culturally, contextual, as is lying. Bodily reactions aren’t the same—though many CIA and FBI polygraphers ardently believe that the machine can effectively cross cultural boundaries. There is some truth to this if we’re talking about the differences, say, between American Catholics and Protestants. It seemed a bit of a push to me if the examinee was French, a much bigger push if Russian, and just surreal if the target was an Iranian raised in Iran.
I have no idea what Ames’s polygraphs revealed about him, but we can be certain of one thing: The tests were worthless in trying to detect someone who would later commit treason. To be a tad invidious toward Iranians: Ames was probably an American "Iranian" in his testing aptitude. Even on basic questions of fact, he might have given the polygrapher a run for his money.
As we celebrate Ames’s passing, the U.S. intelligence community and the FBI are probably patting themselves on the backs for all the methods they’ve put in place to detect traitors and bad apples. Wiser heads should, however, doubt the utility of what’s been done since Ames was arrested in 1994. John le Carré usually misrepresents the world of espionage and covert action, especially the "wilderness of mirrors" that rises when agents and double agents collide.
But the man did understand one thing clearly: Folks on the inside of clandestine services often hate their own side as much, sometimes even more, than they hate the enemy. This is hard to digest for many Americans, especially since our enemies’ sins are so much greater than ours. But this recurring animus is what ought to keep counterintelligence officers awake at night. Finding that sentiment is easy at Langley; assessing whether that sentiment could metastasize into treason, however, verges on reading runes.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former case officer in the CIA, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
