(5 of 8)
In December 1983, Rosario went off the CIA payroll. At roughly the same time, Ames was transferred back to Langley headquarters. The shock of discovering that Ames' paycheck did not stretch as far in Washington as it had in Mexico City was probably compounded by Rosario's loss of income as both a cultural attache and a spy. At the same time, Ames' marriage was heading for divorce.
From late 1983 through 1985, Ames served as chief of the Soviet counterintelligence branch in the S.E. division. With this elevation in status came new duties. From March 1984 to July 1986, when he was transferred to Rome, Ames was authorized to hold frequent phone conversations and meetings with Soviet embassy officials. CIA rules mandated that all such contacts be cleared in advance or reported afterward. Unknown to his superiors, however, Ames began to conduct unauthorized, unreported conversations.
Six months after marrying Rosario, for instance, Ames scheduled a meeting with a Soviet contact. This is the first such unauthorized contact described in the 39-page federal affidavit. By that account, "on or about February 14, 1986, Ames scheduled a meeting with a Soviet contact, which, according to CIA records, he did not thereafter report." This notation implies that Ames' phone transaction was tape-recorded by the FBI but was not cross-checked at the time with CIA records, a move that might have exposed Ames' alleged activities early on. The affidavit further notes that according to bank- deposit slips, the next day Ames and Rosario made four cash deposits totaling $24,000 in their Dominion Bank of Virginia accounts.
Both the phone call and the traceable deposits were careless tradecraft on Ames' part, particularly given the intelligence climate in Washington. The year before, so many Americans had been discovered spying for Moscow -- Edward Lee Howard, Ronald Pelton, John Walker -- that the press had dubbed 1985 "the year of the spy." Pelton and Howard had both been exposed by Yurchenko, the senior KGB officer who had been debriefed by Ames and others before redefecting three months later.
At about the same time, CIA and FBI officials received three grave indicators that they had a mole in their midst. Before they could arrest Howard, he fled to Moscow, seemingly tipped off that the net was closing fast. Perhaps more damaging for intelligence operations, the 1980 Operation Courtship double agents, Motorin and Martynov, were ordered back to Moscow and executed. Again, a mole's touch was indicated.
If Ames was the hand behind the Howard, Motorin and Martynov debacles -- as is now suspected -- he was a cool number. In 1986 he passed the polygraph test routinely administered to intelligence officials every five years. By then there were subtle changes in Ames' behavior, but nothing that a lie detector would pick up. Colleagues still found Ames unsophisticated and lazy, but his dullness had been replaced by a cavalier attitude and an appetite for drinking and dancing. Agency hands recall Ames' sitting with his feet propped on his desk, smoking cigarettes and reading old counterintelligence files. He also spent a lot of time chatting in colleagues' offices -- conversations that will now have to be reconstructed to deduce what Ames might have learned that would have been of value to Moscow.