Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy by Tim Weiner

Author:Tim Weiner
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, True Crime, United States, Espionage, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780307824448
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1995-06-05T14:00:00+00:00

16

A Logical Explanation

It had taken the Central Intelligence Agency the better part of twenty years to assemble the stable of spies Ames had destroyed.

Now Milt Bearden was building a new network of Soviet agents with remarkable speed. An astonishing number of Soviet traitors volunteered their services to the CIA between the summer of 1990 and the fall of 1991. A new one would appear every month or two—most of them high-ranking intelligence officers. The KGB, by virtue of its elite status and its access to secret information, had been picking up signals ever since the early 1980s that the Soviet economy was crumbling. Now the rot in the Soviet system was starting to undermine the central pillars of society, the KGB included.

Some of these new recruits had pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that the CIA’s counterintelligence officers had been trying to assemble for the last five years. None of them had ever seen the picture on the jigsaw puzzle box. But the simple fact of their existence was pure and unalloyed joy for Milt Bearden.

In October 1990, not long after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Milt Bearden met with some senior KGB officials on neutral territory. These liaisons in European capitals were now becoming commonplace as the tensions of the cold war began to subside. The agenda for the meeting included planning joint operations against drug smugglers and terrorists as well as assessing the war clouds gathering over Iraq.

Eventually the subject of the defections came up. A general in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate asked plaintively: “What is going on with all these people? The finest majors and lieutenant colonels, the ones with red diplomas with gold lettering?” Bearden said he told his Soviet counterpart a barbed joke: The chairman of the board of a dog food factory is haranguing his subordinates about the plummeting sales of their product. Our dog food is the best in the world! The most nutritious, most efficiently produced, best-packaged dog food in the world! So why are we going broke? A terrified silence is broken by a junior account executive at the far end of the table. Sir? he says. Dogs don’t like it.

The dogs were now turning tail and running into the arms of their old enemy. But not all of them proved faithful to their new masters.

A new Soviet defector offered his services to the CIA in Germany in the fall of 1990. This man had the answer to the case that had consumed the CIA’s Soviet division. He said the KGB had recruited an officer from the Soviet division sometime around 1975. This traitor had served in the Moscow station at some point. He had a reputation for living high and wild, spending a lot of money, eating and drinking in nice restaurants.

The defector’s detailed information dovetailed with bits and pieces of inconclusive information, hearsay, rumor, and innuendo left over from a dozen cases the Agency and the FBI had pursued off and on for the past fifteen years. It galvanized

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