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The KGB forced some of the agents already arrested and imprisoned to take part in various schemes to mislead the CIA. For example, one source arrested by the KGB was made to contact a person in the U.S. in an effort to convince the FBI that his life was normal and he was having no problems. In addition, Soviet officials, prodded by the KGB, would deftly leak information to CIA officers suggesting that agents had been lost because they had made mistakes.
This game tied up Vertefeuille and her tiny staff for several years. In 1986 and 1987 the team held a series of meetings with an FBI task force called anlace, which had been set up to try to discover why two KGB officers working for the FBI in Washington had been executed after they returned to Moscow. Then in 1988, the CIA established a new counterintelligence center and folded Vertefeuille and her tiny band of mole hunters into it. She was put in charge of a branch that had responsibility for investigating all cases involving possible penetration of the CIA. The members of Vertefeuille's team were assigned to other cases that were deemed more important than the ones the task force had been set up to probe.
Then in November 1989, the CIA received its first tip pointing to Aldrich Ames. A woman employee of the agency who knew Ames well reported that he had bought an expensive house and was living beyond his means. (Ames had been earning around $50,000 a year in 1985 when he first became a traitor.) The informant also knew that Ames had access to the compromised Soviet cases. And she knew that his wife Rosario did not come from a wealthy family. Based on this information, the CIA's Dan Payne, a young man who was the only investigator assigned to Vertefeuille's unit, began a routine inquiry into Ames' spending. Payne examined real estate records in Arlington County and found that Ames had paid $540,000 for his house. There was no record of a mortgage. He asked the Treasury Department whether Ames' name had shown up on any currency transaction reports, which require banks and merchants to notify the government of cash payments in amounts larger than $10,000. Payne got three hits.
The CIA now knew that Ames had bought a half-million-dollar house in cash, that he was putting large chunks of cash in the bank and that he was an officer with access to the blown Soviet cases. It also knew from the informant that his wife's family was not independently wealthy. Yet no flashing red lights and alarm bells went off in Langley.
Ames seemed almost within the mole hunters' grasp, but he slipped away. In January 1990, Dan Payne was assigned to begin a two-month training course. No one was brought in to replace him. When he returned in March, he was pulled off the Ames investigation and sent overseas to pursue another lead in the mole hunt that proved to be a wild goose chase.
From July 1986 until July 1989, Ames served in Rome as a CIA officer at the American embassy. During his posting, he distinguished himself by getting drunk at a reception in the U.S. ambassador's garden and passing out in the gutter, where the carabinieri picked him up and took him to the hospital. In Rome Ames met repeatedly with his KGB handlers. He also bought his first Jaguar.