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In July 1983, Aldrich Hazen Ames was appointed to head the Soviet Counterintelligence Group of the SE Division. As such he had complete access to its two sub-branches: the USSR Desk handling all Soviet assets working for the United States but posted inside the USSR, and the External Ops Desk handling all assets then posted outside the USSR.
On April 16, 1985, short of money, he walked into the Soviet Embassy on Washington’s Sixteenth Street, asked to see Colonel Androsov, and volunteered to spy for Russia. For fifty thousand dollars.
He brought with him some small bona fides. He gave away the names of three Russians who had approached the CIA offering to work for it. Later he would say he thought they were probably double agents, i.e., not genuine. Whatever, those three gentlemen were never heard from again. He also brought an internal CIA personnel list with his own name highlighted to prove he was who he said he was. Then he left, walking for the second time right past the FBI cameras filming the front forecourt. The tapes were never p
layed back.
Two days later he got his fifty thousand dollars. It was just the start. The most damaging traitor in America’s history, back to and probably including Benedict Arnold, had just started work.
Later analysts would puzzle over two enigmas. The first was how such a grossly inadequate, underperforming, alcohol-abusing loser could ever have risen through the ranks to such an amazing position of trust. The second was how, when the senior hierarchs knew by that December in their secret hearts that they had a traitor among them somewhere, he could have remained unexposed for a further—and for the CIA catastrophic—eight years.
The answer to the second has a dozen facets. Incompetence, lethargy, and complacency within the CIA, luck for the traitor, a skillful disinformation campaign by the KGB to protect its mole, more lethargy, squeamishness, and indolence at Langley, red herrings, more luck for the traitor, and, finally, the memory of James Angleton.
Angleton had once been head of counterintelligence at the agency, rising to become a legend and ending deranged by paranoia. This strange man, without private life or humor, became convinced there was a KGB mole, code-named Sasha, inside Langley. In fanatic pursuit of this nonexistent traitor, he crippled the careers of loyal officer after loyal officer until he finally brought the Operations Directorate to its knees. Those who survived him, risen by 1985 to high office, were desolated at the thought of doing what had to be done—searching with rigor for the real mole.
As for the first question, the answer can be given in two words: Ken Mulgrew.
In twenty years with the agency before he turned traitor, Ames had had three postings outside Langley. In Turkey his Chief of Station deemed him to be a complete waste of space; the veteran Dewey Clarridge loathed and despised him from the start.
In the New York office he had a lucky break that brought him kudos. Although the Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, Arkady Shevchenko, had been working for the CIA before Ames arrived, and his final defection to the States in April 1978 was masterminded by another officer, Ames handled the Ukrainian in between. He was by then already becoming a very serious drinker.
His third posting, in Mexico, was a fiasco. He was consistently drunk, insulted colleagues and foreigners, fell down and was helped home by the Mexican police, broke every standing operating procedure imaginable, and recruited nobody.
On both the overseas postings Ames’s performance reports were appalling. In one wide-spectrum performance assessment he came 198th out of 200 officers.
Normally such a career would go nowhere near the top. By the early eighties all the senior hierarchs—Carey Jordan, Dewey Clarridge, Milton Bearden, Gus Hathaway, and Paul Redmond—thought he was a useless article. But not Ken Mulgrew, who became his friend and protector.
It was he who sanitized the dreadful performance and assessment reports, smoothed the path, and procured the promotions. As Ames’s senior he overrode the objections and, while heading up Personnel Allocations, slipped Ames into the Counterintelligence Group.
Basically, they were drinking buddies, both serial boozers who with the self-pity of the alcoholic agreed with each other that the agency was grossly unfair to both of them. It was a judgmental error that would soon cost a lot of lives.
¯
LEONID Zaitsev the Rabbit was dying but he did not know it. He was in great pain. This he knew.
Colonel Grishin believed in pain. He believed in pain as persuasion, pain as example to the witnesses, and pain as punishment. Zaitsev had sinned and the colonel’s orders were that he should fully comprehend the meaning of pain before he died.
The interrogation had lasted all day and there had been no call to use violence because he had told everything that was asked of him. Grishin had been alone with him most of the time, because he did not wish the guards to hear what had been stolen.
The colonel had asked him, quite gently, to start at the beginning, so he had. He had been required to repeat the story over and over again until Grishin was satisfied no detail had been left out. There was not really much to tell.
Only when he explained why he had done it was the colonel’s face masked in disbelief.
“A beer? The English gave you a beer?”
By midday Grishin was convinced he had it all. The chances were, he reckoned, that confronted with this scarecrow the young Englishwoman would throw the file away, but he could not be sure. He dispatched a car with four trusted men to stake out the embassy and wait for the little red car, then follow it to wherever she lived and reported back.
Just after three he gave final orders to his Guards and left. As he drove out of the compound, an A-300 Airbus with British Airways livery on its tailfin turned toward northern Moscow and headed west. He did not notice. He ordered his driver to take him back to the dacha off Kiselny Boulevard.
There were four of them. The Rabbit’s legs would have buckled, but they knew that so two of them held him up, fingers digging hard into his upper arms. The other two were one front, one back. They worked slowly and placed their punches diligently.
The big fists were wrapped in heavy knobbed brass knuckles. The punches crushed his kidneys, tore his liver, and ruptured his spleen. A kick pulped his old testicles. The man at the front drove into the belly, then moved up to the chest. He fainted twice but a bucket of cold water brought him around and the pain returned. His legs ceased to function so they held his light frame on tiptoe.
Toward the end the ribs in the skinny chest cracked and sprung, two driving deep into the lungs. Something warm and sweet and sticky rose in his throat so that he could not breathe.
His vision narrowed to a tunnel and he saw not the gray concrete blocks of the room behind the camp armory, but a bright sunny day with a sandy road and pine trees. He could not see the speaker, but a voice was saying to him:
“Come on, mate, ‘ave a beer ... ‘ave a beer.”