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Let the hunters hunt--a mole must enjoy life to the hilt while he can. In January 1992 Ames bought his third Jaguar. He traded in his 2 1/2-year-old white one for a red XJ6. As he had done all along, Ames blithely drove his Jaguar into the CIA parking lot every workday.
That spring the joint mole-hunt unit decided to take another look at Ames' wealth. Paul Redmond assigned the task to Dan Payne, who had begun the financial inquiry three years earlier but been pulled off it. Ames was also the only suspect singled out for this type of investigation.
This time the agency invoked legal provisions allowing it to query banks and credit companies. In June responses began to flow in, and the task force learned for the first time that Aldrich and Rosario Ames were spending at least $30,000 a month with credit cards. By August the team knew that hundreds of thousands of dollars had been deposited in Ames' accounts in the Dominion Bank of Virginia, much of the money from wire transfers of undetermined origin. As the mole hunters dug into Ames' bank accounts in the fall of 1992, they discovered that by that time, wire transfers of about $1 million and cash deposits of more than $500,000 had been made.
In 1992, as the mole hunters drew closer to their target, Jeanne Vertefeuille turned 60, and under CIA rules she had to take mandatory retirement. She had searched for the traitor for almost six years and could have gone off to the Sunbelt to enjoy life, like so many of her colleagues. But Vertefeuille was not about to give up the chase, especially now. She returned to the CIA on contract with no interruption of her employment.
It was Sandy Grimes who in October 1992 made the breakthrough. She correlated the dates of Ames' meetings with Chuvakhin in 1985 and 1986--which were known to the CIA and the FBI--with the dates of his bank deposits. She found that many of the deposits came right after the luncheons. Now, in October 1992, the mole hunters were reasonably sure that they had their quarry, and that it was Rick Ames.
In January 1993, Vertefeuille's team, persuaded that Ames was the mole, began briefing the FBI so the bureau could take over the case (the CIA has no powers of arrest). It was not until after mid-March, however, that the FBI was convinced that the target of the investigation should be Ames. By early May, the FBI was ready to move. "We opened the case on Ames on May 12, 1993," said John Lewis, the FBI's No. 2 counterintelligence official, who supervised the investigation. "We called it Nightmover."
The code name stood for both the investigation and Ames himself. Lewis chose Les Wiser, a 38-year-old FBI agent, to head the team that kept Ames and his wife under surveillance for nine months. The FBI tapped the couple's phone, bugged their house, combed through their trash, downloaded Ames' computer, followed him to Bogota and gathered the evidence it needed to prove he was a spy.