Circle of Treason (22 page)

After reading Sandy's memorandum Jeanne telephoned the SE Division office directly responsible for running the case. She made a special plea that Sandy's requirements be an important order of business, because they could prove whether the case was good or bad. The reply was extremely disheartening. The SE front office had decided that “we don't want to make him mad.” Therefore the new source would not be asked questions to determine his bona fides. In Jeanne and Sandy's opinion, this flew in the face of logic. When someone volunteered, it was up to that volunteer to provide evidence of his honesty, credibility, and value. Yet we were ignoring this normal and sensible procedure.

The case went on and on, and both Sandy and Jeanne freely expressed, both orally and in writing, the opinion that we were being taken in. And during this period we benefited from the reporting of defector Sergey Papushin who, like Zhomov, was an officer from the KGB's Second Chief Directorate and indeed was acquainted with him. Although the differences were not major, what Papushin said about Zhomov did not jibe with what Zhomov had told us about himself. For instance, Papushin told us that Zhomov was happily married and doted on his daughter. Zhomov said
that his marriage was on the rocks, and this was one of the reasons he wanted to defect.

Eventually Zhomov was asked some of the questions that Sandy had compiled, but his answers were vague or improbable and did nothing to allay our doubts. Jeanne even wrote a second memorandum stating that after watching the case for more than a year she was still convinced that it was not valid. Sandy continued to insert the test questions in each cable to the field for presentation to Zhomov, only to have them deleted by the front office before transmission. Bearden was reported to have commented that these requirements were nonsense. He would soon learn how wrong he had been.

All of our efforts went for naught. In the end the CIA paid Zhomov a good deal of money, which served to sweeten the KGB's coffers, revealed to him our procedures for clandestinely exfiltrating our assets from the Soviet Union, provided him with a valid U.S. passport, and generally made fools of ourselves. He of course never went through with the exfiltration, claiming that our plan was too dangerous and that he would have to break contact. His message did not ring true, and finally the powers-that-be, including an unwilling Bearden, came to the conclusion that we had been duped all along.

Sandy and Jeanne, who had put their opinions on record long before, were in the position of being able to say, “I told you so,” but that was scant comfort. The KGB must have had many a laugh at the CIA's expense, and this did not sit well with us. The only good that resulted from this mess was that it caused Sandy to abandon SE Division and its “new-think” flight from reality, and join in the revitalized hunt for the meaning of the 1985 disasters.

BEGINNING OF THE FOCUS ON AMES

O
NE MORNING IN EARLY
N
OVEMBER
1989 a breakthrough occurred, although we did not realize its full significance at the time. Diana Worthen approached Sandy Grimes in her office, obviously distressed and worried by the story she was about to recount. Worthen had been stationed in Mexico City during the same period as Rick Ames and had worked for him in the Soviet section. She and Rick became friends and this friendship was soon extended to Rosario Casas Dupuy, cultural attaché at the Colombian embassy. Rick and Rosario had started an affair, although Rick was still married to his first wife, Nan. He was a geographic bachelor because Nan had a good job in New York and refused to accompany him to Mexico.

Diana's friendship with Rick and Rosario continued over the years after they all had left Mexico. Rick divorced Nan and married Rosario in 1985. In 1986 they left for a three-year tour in Rome. While they were there, Diana sent Rosario a few small items in response to her requests for things not readily available in Rome. These included pantyhose and pregnancy vitamins. In return, Rosario sent Diana some expensive gifts, including a Gucci scarf worth at least two hundred dollars. Rosario's gifts to Diana were out of proportion with the small sums that Diana had expended.

When Rick and Rosario returned to Washington, Diana noticed a substantial change in their lifestyle. Before going to Rome they had lived in a rented apartment in a modest development in northern Virginia and
Rick drove an ancient Volvo. Now they were the owners of a large house in a posh section of North Arlington. Diana was astounded when Rosario told her that they had paid the asking price of $540,000 without trying to bargain. She was even more astounded when she learned that they were remodeling the kitchen, contracting for extensive landscaping, and ordering window treatments for every window, all at the same time. Additionally, Rick had purchased a new Jaguar for himself and a new Honda Accord for Rosario.

Diana could see that these expenditures amounted to a very large sum and she wondered where the money had come from. Neither Rick nor Rosario offered any explanation. In her musings, Diana was aware of a fact that most people did not know. When they were all in Mexico, Rosario had no extra money and lived from paycheck to paycheck.

After much soul-searching, Diana shared her observations with Sandy. Sandy immediately suggested to Diana that the information could be important, and that they should tell Redmond right away, which they did. Redmond impatiently listened to Diana's remarks, as Sandy reminded him that Rick knew about every case we had lost. He had access and now he apparently had money. Redmond was preoccupied with other matters and curtly told them to go to Jeanne. He then forgot about the conversation. On her own, Diana duly approached Jeanne to repeat her story once again. Unfortunately, the day she did so was within twenty-four hours of the surfacing of the Agee false flag operation. Jeanne told Diana to talk to Dan Payne, and almost immediately became immersed in the Agee problem to the exclusion of everything else.

At this point Diana felt exceedingly frayed, but she did not give up. She went to Dan Payne to tell her story for the fourth time. Dan was busy with a number of cases, but he listened to Diana and, more importantly, took preliminary action based on her account. He started by reviewing Rick's Office of Security and Office of Personnel files. These did not contain much of CI interest, although they revealed that in the distant past Rick had received two DUI citations. They also documented that, on two occasions in the 1970s, he had been drunk at an office Christmas party. (In those days, heavy drinking at CIA office festivities was not outside the norm. Christmas parties began in the afternoon and focused on alcohol, not food. The Office of Security had to maintain checkpoints at the various exits to the buildings, in an effort to ascertain who was too drunk to
drive and to make arrangements to get them safely home. Those days are now long gone.) The security file also indicated that Rick had last been polygraphed in 1986, and that he was cleared in a single session.

Dan's next step was to read Rosario's operational, or 201, file. Diana had told him that Rosario had worked as a low-level agent for the CIA Station in Mexico City, both by occasionally making her apartment available for station officers to hold meetings in, and by reporting on individuals she met in the course of her duties as secretary of the local diplomatic association. More pertinent to Dan's interest at the time was information in the file disclosing that Rosario came from a politically connected family in Colombia. Her father was a former head of the Liberal Party. Rosario's assignment to the Colombian embassy in Mexico City was a direct appointment by Colombian president Turbay. Moreover, her father was also rector of a university, and had attended Princeton.

As part of his preliminary investigation, Dan went to the Arlington County courthouse to check on Rick's mortgage for his new residence, but could find no record of it. Eventually he had to make two more trips to the courthouse in order to convince Jeanne that he had checked in every possible way and that the mortgage really did not exist.

Dan also initiated a routine customs check. This turned up three currency transactions, as follows:

18 Oct 1985—deposits of $15,660 cash

18 Feb 1986—deposits of $13,500 cash

1 Aug 1989—$22,107 lira exchange

None of us knew what this meant, but Dan added the information to his growing file on Rick.

While all this was going on, a ghost from the past reappeared. His name was Sergey Petrovich Fedorenko. An academic researcher with the Soviet Institute of the United States and Canada (IUSAC), he had been recruited in New York back in 1973 and run in place by the CIA and FBI until his return to the Soviet Union in 1977. The CIA encrypted him GTPYRRHIC. His FBI cryptonym was MYRRH. One of his handlers was Rick, who traveled from Washington periodically to participate in the operation.

Fedorenko was not the only CIA or FBI agent who had escaped the 1985 destruction, but these “escapees” numbered fewer than ten and
were therefore of major interest in our investigation. (Much later, when we reviewed these cases as a group, we estimated that they fit one of two categories: either they were minor players who did not have access to state secrets, and were therefore not dangerous to Soviet interests, or they had been dangles in the first place. All of the evidence is that Fedorenko belongs in the “minor player” category.)

Once Fedorenko arrived in the United States in late 1989, arrangements were made immediately to recontact him. The two people chosen to handle the debriefings were Pat Watson of the FBI and Rick from the CIA. Because we in the CI Investigations Branch were highly interested in hearing what Fedorenko had to say about the twelve years he had spent in Moscow out of touch with us, we asked Rick to come down and give us a rundown on Fedorenko's experiences. Unfortunately, what we learned did not really help. Fedorenko said that he believed he had been under suspicion, but that he had never been arrested.

The debriefings continued for some time, in a somewhat acrimonious atmosphere. Some in SE Division believed that Fedorenko was under KGB control, while others considered him a valid, if not particularly valuable, source. Jeanne and Sandy belonged to the second category. Eventually, Fedorenko settled in the United States, where he still lives today.

Throughout the affair, Rick defended Fedorenko, to the point of becoming obnoxious. Not only did he believe that Fedorenko was a bona fide asset, he also persisted in overestimating Fedorenko's access and reporting. This led to a minor hullabaloo. Zhomov had reported on a case that could have been that of Fedorenko, although it was not a close fit. A memorandum was prepared and placed in Fedorenko's file. The memorandum was sanitized so that no information regarding Zhomov's identity could be ascertained. With the exception of Jeanne and Sandy, the thinking at the time was the reverse of reality. Zhomov had to be protected because he was a bona fide volunteer with information of prospective great value. Fedorenko was a plant who had to be exposed. Anyway, Rick heard about the memorandum and learned that Fedorenko's file had been placed in a safe for which he did not have the combination. Thus Rick could not read the memorandum, even though it was pertinent to his case. This incensed Rick and he somehow managed to access the safe in question and read the report. He then wrote a rebuttal casting doubt on the theory that Zhomov's reporting pertained to Fedorenko.

That Rick entered the safe to read the memorandum was a breach of well-understood security practices and it further set some people against him. However, he was responsible for handling Fedorenko and, given his somewhat arrogant personality, it was not terribly surprising that he took this action. And he made no effort to conceal what he had done because he promptly wrote a refutation to Zhomov's supposed lead.

As it turned out, the CIA discarded Fedorenko based partly on SE Division management's mistaken assessment of Zhomov's report and partly on Fedorenko's troubles with a polygraph examination. The FBI, on the other hand, continued to believe in Fedorenko and kept in contact with him.

While all this was going on, Dan had been diverted from his preliminary investigation of Rick. The fast-changing scene in Eastern Europe had resulted in the CIA's recruitment of a number of new sources, some of whom provided information possibly related to penetrations of the CIA. One case that absorbed Dan's time involved an Eastern Bloc service's knowledge of personal details about one of our officers. How had the service in question learned this information? After an exhaustive investigation, Dan deduced that the officer in question had a relative who was working for the Eastern Bloc service and had supplied the information.

Another case concerned Karel Koecher. Koecher, a Czech national, had been recruited by his country's intelligence service in the early 1960s. He immigrated to the United States in 1965, and became a U.S. citizen. After he received his citizenship he applied to the CIA, and was hired as a translator/transcriber with SE Division after successfully completing a polygraph. He later left the CIA because of dissatisfaction with his position, which was not commensurate with his educational background.