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

Copyright 1995 by Tim Weiner, David Johnston, Neil A. Lewis

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

eISBN: 978-0-307-82444-8

v3.1

When a mans partner is killed hes supposed to do something about it. It doesnt make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and youre supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, its bad business to let the killer get away with it. Its bad business all around. Bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere.

Sam Spade to Brigid OShaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Les Wiser snapped awake in a rush of adrenaline. His watchthe one hed bought in Berlin, with the red star and the letters CCCP on the dialsaid three A.M.

He showered quickly, dressed in a pale gray suit, left his wife and two sleeping kids in bed, and drove swiftly from his home in the Maryland suburbs toward Washington. The roads were empty on this Monday, Presidents Day, February 21, 1994. The federal government was closed, and most of the people who made it run were still asleep.

He steered his 1991 black Ford Taurus through the deserted side streets of the capital and into the garage of the Federal Bureau of Investigations Washington Metropolitan Field Office. The ugly high-rise building, wreathed in the deathly orange glow of mercury vapor streetlights, stood in Buzzard Point, a grim and isolated backwater of the city. It housed the FBIs street humps, the agents who worked in the District of Columbia and its surrounding suburbs.

Wiser was a tall man of thirty-nine, low-key, bespectacled, his mustache flecked with gray. At first glance he could be taken for an ordinary government bureaucrat, but the nine-millimeter Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol on his left hip gave him away. Wiser was an FBI supervisory special agent, a squad leader, who had joined the Bureau in 1983 after working as a Navy lawyer. He had started at the bottom, working wiretaps, fugitive cases, and graveyard shifts.

He rode the elevator to the eleventh floor, letting himself in through the secured doors, and walked down a corridor with beige walls and threadbare carpeting. He stopped at an unmarked door just a few yards from his bosss office, pressed the buttons on a coded lock, and entered a windowless interior room, the squad bay for his case.

For nine months, Wiser had worked out of this cramped cocoon of an office twelve hours a day, sometimes longer. Everyone working on his caseWiser, his agents, the surveillance teamshad had to take lie-detector tests and abandon the idea of time off. Wiser himself had spent Christmas Day with headphones on in a tiny downstairs office jammed with blinking electronic gear, listening to wiretaps. Everybody knew Wiser hunted spies, but he waved off anyone who asked what he was up to, telling them he was working on a case from The X Files, a television show about FBI agents investigating paranormal phenomena.

In fact, he was working the biggest case of his life. It was an espionage case, code-named Nightmover.

He and his squad had found a mole inside the Central Intelligence Agency. The mole had burned almost every Soviet agent who was secretly working for the United States. At least ten of them had been arrested and executed. It had been a disaster without parallel for the CIA. But the Agency had refused to believe it harbored a traitor, and it had surrounded the disaster in a shield of secrecy. It had not called in the FBI until 1991.

Once the Bureau knew the facts, in 1993, it had opened a full-fledged criminal investigation. Wiser and his agentsthe listeners who tapped telephones and planted bugs in the moles house, the accountants who sifted his American Express bills, the watchers who trailed him around the clock, the black-bag agents who stole his trash and surreptitiously searched his house, the pilots who flew the light plane that secretly trailed his carhad amassed a mountain of circumstantial evidence against their target. They had come to be on intimate terms with him, calling him by his first name, listening to the chatter and babble of his telephone conversations with his wife, and picking up clues that she was entangled in his espionage. They shadowed him when he took his five-year-old son to the movies, reacted with disgust when he paid $9,000 in cash one day at the Neiman-Marcus department store to settle his bills, surveilled him in airport bars as he drank vodka and smoked cigarettes like a man bent on giving himself a heart attack.

More than that, they knew his mind. He was arrogant. He was book-smart but not streetwise. And he was one of the sloppiest, most brazen, and least savvy spies imaginable.

But Wiser had been careful not to underestimate him. The man was, after all, a trained intelligence officer, schooled in the art of spotting somebody on his tail. And though the FBI knew their man was in touch with the Russians, and though they had tracked more than $1.5 million he had mysteriously deposited into his bank accounts, they never had caught him in the act of slipping CIA documents into a cache or pocketing a payoff from Moscow.

Six oclock. Wiser waited in the dismal squad bay as the day dawned gray and dreary over the capital. His surveillance crew had spent the night at checkpoints throughout the moles neighborhood across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginiaa fancy suburb, a lot fancier than Wiser or the rest of his squad could afford. The lookouts had the moles half-million-dollar split-level house surrounded.

Downstairs at the field office, the listeners sat in a tiny cubicle before a blinking circuit board tuned to the telephone taps and hidden microphones in the house on North Randolph Street. Wiser checked the surveillance. Nothing stirring. The mole was unaware that an intricate web of electronic and physical surveillance was about to snare him. Still, Wiser felt a lump tightening in his gut, the fear that the slightest mistake would make his quarry bolt. The mole was scheduled to leave tomorrow on an official trip that would take him to Moscow. The idea that he might defect was on everyones mind, and no one cared to contemplate the consequences.

Six-thirty. The Special Surveillance Group, the FBI employees who tailed the target night and day, reported that all remained calm. They knew their mans habits by heart. He would have left the house by now if he were going to send a clandestine message to his Russian controllers, a chalk mark on a mailbox signifying he was ready to deliver a computer disk of classified documents covertly copied at CIA headquarters. If he went out early to leave a signal, they would postpone the arrest to see what he was up to. But if he did nothing, they would arrest him.

A few minutes after seven, Wiser gave the order to proceed as planned. Nearly a hundred FBI agents, technicians, and support personnel quietly converged on the neighborhood. The men who were going to arrest the target drove directly to their forward staging base, the parking lot of an Italian delicatessen a quarter mile from the house on North Randolph Street. They had gone there a lot during the investigation. Great sandwiches.