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Among the senior officials at the directorate of operations, there was a presumption that no colleague could be a traitor. Still, the possibility of a mole could not be discounted. In January 1986, CIA Director William Casey asked for a review of the compromised agents. Although that report concluded that they had probably been lost for operational reasons, Clair George, the deputy director for operations, did not agree. He told Casey, "I think we've been penetrated." Not until October 1986, however--almost a year after the CIA began to realize it had a serious problem--did it finally act to try to pinpoint the source of the trouble. George ordered Gus Hathaway, the counterintelligence chief, to appoint a small special task force to study the problem. Hathaway named Vertefeuille, who had returned from Gabon, as the head of the task force.
At first the team consisted of only four people. It would have to start from scratch in analyzing the unexplained losses and trying to find their cause. Not a single member was trained in criminal work. It was clear from the resources allocated to Vertefeuille that finding the mole was not a high priority among the CIA's leaders. Why not? "They didn't want to know," said one intelligence official. "If you find a mole, you have to deal with him. It becomes embarrassingly public."
To help her, Vertefeuille had only Fran Smith, a veteran in the Soviet division, and two retirees, Benjamin Franklin Pepper and Daniel Niesciur. Later, Sandy Grimes, another experienced officer in the Soviet division, joined the team. The assignment of three women--Vertefeuille, Smith and Grimes--reflected a sexist belief among the CIA's senior male executives that "little gray-haired old ladies," as one case officer put it, were best suited to perform the painstaking work of catching a mole. Computers might help, the prevailing wisdom went, but only the women had the patience and the skills to go through mountains of files and extract clues.
The special task force was housed on the second floor at Langley, just another office among the several of the counterintelligence staff. The existence of the unit and the work it was performing were tightly held secrets.
Vertefeuille's job, and the team's, was to look at all the compromised cases and to discover, first, which CIA offices had handled or known of them and which officers had access to the files. They were asked to find any common strands among the cases that might provide clues to what had happened. And they were asked to determine how many cases might have been betrayed by Edward Lee Howard, the former CIA officer who sold secrets to the KGB, escaped into the New Mexico desert in 1985 and surfaced in Moscow a year later. Of the cases Howard had not known about, Vertefeuille and her team were asked to determine how many might be explained by other factors, such as sloppiness on the part of either the agent or the CIA case officer.
The task force did not have an easy time. It was not only the lack of support from above, the atmosphere of languid unconcern that permeated the agency's executive suite. The KGB made its own contribution. From the start the KGB assumed that the CIA would look for a penetration after its agents began disappearing. Moscow therefore did everything it could to deflect the attention of the mole hunters and send them down blind alleys.