(2 of 8)
She was fluent in French, in which her name means "green leaf." She seldom talked about herself, but it was known she had grown up in the Northeast. She had been posted to Ethiopia in the late 1950s and served in the CIA station in Finland in the early 1960s and in the Hague in the mid-1960s. In the early 1970s she had found her metier, counterintelligence--combatting opposition spies and moles--when she was appointed head of the research section in the Soviet division's counterintelligence group, then chief of the branch that maintained biographies on Soviet and East European operatives. When a new KGB officer popped up in Bangkok, or the agency was targeting a GRU colonel in Prague as a possible recruit, the field would ask headquarters to run name traces on these individuals to see what the CIA's computers might hold. Vertefeuille was in charge of that process.
In 1984 she was named chief of station in Gabon, in West Africa. Even today, in the male-dominated CIA, there are relatively few women station chiefs, and her appointment more than a decade ago was an unusual recognition of her talents. Never mind that Gabon had not even had a station chief until three years before or that Vertefeuille ran a one-woman station, in charge only of herself, an assistant and a code clerk. The point was, she was a COS.
When Vertefeuille went to Gabon, Aldrich Ames was working in Langley as Soviet branch chief in the counterintelligence division. On June 13, 1985, in his fourth-floor office, he wrapped up between 5 and 7 lbs. of cable traffic and other secret documents in plastic bags, walked out to the parking lot and drove across the Potomac to Chadwick's, a Washington saloon under the K Street Freeway in Georgetown. There he met Sergei Chuvakhin, the first secretary of the Soviet embassy in Washington, and handed him the plastic bags.
It was the largest amount of sensitive data ever passed to the KGB in a single meeting. Inside the bags was the most secret information Langley possessed-the names of some of the most important Soviet sources working for the CIA and FBI.
During the course of the next 12 months, Ames lunched with Chuvakhin at least 14 times. He had a perfect cover because his CIA superiors had authorized him to meet with Soviet officials to try to recruit them. At his lunches with Chuvakhin, he continued providing all sorts of classified documents to the KGB, including the identity of more Soviet sources. The results were immediate and devastating. In the fall of 1985 and continuing into early 1986, some 20 CIA agents in the Soviet Union simply disappeared, vanishing off the agency's screen.
It was clear--or should have been--that something had gone terribly wrong. The likelihood that all these agents had been arrested because they or the CIA made operational mistakes simply defied the law of averages and common sense. Some other explanation--a compromised code or a KGB penetration of CIA communications--was possible, but remote. Everything pointed toward a human penetration. A mole.
It was a hideous prospect--that someone inside the CIA was betraying the agency's operations to the KGB. Faced with a disaster of such apocalyptic proportions, the agency might have been expected to turn Langley upside down. To pull out all the stops. To launch a major investigation. It did not.