From the spring of 1985 until February 1994, Aldrich Ames was Moscow's master spy inside the CIA. In the course of his work on behalf of the KGB, for which he was paid or promised $4.6 million, he betrayed dozens of Soviets whom the CIA had recruited. Ten were eventually executed; others were condemned to prison sentences in the Gulag. Ames also revealed hundreds of American intelligence operations to the KGB.
Even though Ames had a history of heavy drinking, even though he had worked in the CIA's Soviet division and even though he was spending far more money than his salary would have permitted, the CIA took eight years to identify him as a mole. Fundamentally, the CIA did not want to face the possibility that it had been penetrated. As a result, the investigation dragged on and on with little encouragement or support from on high.
In the midst of this devastating episode, the perseverance, brains and character of only a handful of people stand out. One of them is a quiet, gray-haired woman named Jeanne Vertefeuille. Until now her role in tracking down Ames has never been reported, but many at the CIA call her the heroine of the investigation. The following excerpt from Nightmover, David Wise's new book about the Ames case, deals with Vertefeuille's story. "The CIA thought it had picked a minor leaguer, but she proved she was good enough for the majors," says Wise. "In the end, she got Ames."
At first glance, Jeanne Vertefeuille might have seemed an unlikely choice to hunt down the most damaging mole in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was so plain looking, so mousy and nondescript that she would never stand out in a crowd, which suited her. She had never married, as far as anyone knew. The CIA was her life. She lived alone in a condo in McLean, Virginia, so close to the CIA's headquarters in Langley that she walked to work each day. If a co-worker stopped to offer her a lift, she would not accept unless it was raining hard.
She was, however, almost preordained for the task. For years she had toiled quietly in the research section of the Soviet division and the counterintelligence staff. There was hardly an important, or even an unimportant, case involving the KGB or the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) that she did not know. Jeanne Vertefeuille could follow the tangled threads that might link a case in Kuala Lumpur 10 years ago to one in Vienna today. If a KGB colonel had appeared in Copenhagen under one name and turned up a decade later in New Delhi with another identity, give it to Jeanne-she would sort it out.
She liked to work in obscurity. Within the agency there were some who compared her to John le Carre's fictional Connie Sachs, the brilliant researcher who knew all the Soviet cases and embodied the institutional memory of the Circus. But Vertefeuille did not encourage such talk; it veered too close to a kind of celebrity.