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Fifteen months after his return to Langley, Ames was, astonishingly, assigned to the CIA counterintelligence center. He was given this assignment even though he was under investigation. The master mole was now working in the very CIA component designed to protect the agency against penetration: the center was supposed to find moles.
Fortunately, Ames was not assigned to the mole-hunt unit itself. Instead he was given a position in the U.S.S.R. branch of the center's analysis group. This meant Ames was preparing studies of KGB operations, which was truly placing the fox in charge of the chicken coop. In effect, the KGB was now in a position to read, and influence, the content of the CIA's reports on the KGB. In the counterintelligence center, Ames had access to highly sensitive data bases that contained the details, among other subjects, of double-agent cases. He could and did browse at leisure through the secret electronic files. For the KGB, it was rather like subscribing to a new and highly classified data base called CIA Online.
On Dec. 5, 1990, Dan Payne sent a memo to the CIA's office of security asking that it open an investigation of Ames based on his "lavish spending habits over the past five years." The memo noted that Ames was working in the counterintelligence center and had bought a second Jaguar after returning from Rome. "There is a degree of urgency involved in our request," Payne wrote. "Since Ames has been assigned to CIC, his access has been limited. Unfortunately, we are quickly running out of things for him to do without granting him greater access."
Early in 1991, Paul Redmond became deputy chief of the counterintelligence center. He intensely disliked Ames, whom he had supervised in the past. Once again Redmond was Ames' boss, and they clashed frequently. A short, brusque man given to profanity in both English and Serbo-Croatian, Redmond, like Vertefeuille, had for years remained deeply troubled about the reasons why the CIA had lost so many agents in 1985 and '86. In his new position, he had access to information about Ames' high living and suspected Ames as a possible mole. Redmond's personal antipathy toward Ames only reinforced his suspicions.
In April 1991, Redmond and Vertefeuille went to the FBI and met with Raymond Mislock Jr., chief of the Soviet section of the intelligence division, and Robert Wade, the assistant section chief. Redmond told the two FBI men that the agency was reviving the mole hunt. The two organizations agreed to join forces. Now, for the first time, the agency and the bureau formed a joint mole-hunt team. Jeanne Vertefeuille remained in charge of the CIA side.
On Nov. 12, 1991, the joint team interviewed Ames. He had no doubt about what was going on. Twice he volunteered that he had received a security violation while in the Soviet division for leaving a safe open. The safe, Ames added helpfully, had contained chronologies of Soviet cases and the combinations to other safes. It seems clear, in retrospect, that Ames was trying to explain a possible cause of the 1985 agent losses while deflecting suspicion that he was himself the mole. The mole hunters did not buy it. They decided to run a computer search of directorate of operations records for every mention of Ames' name in the CIA's files, something that was not done on any other suspect.