04x16 - Finding Aldrich Ames: The Hunt for a Mole

[bunniefuu]

It was 1985 that
everything began to go bad.

We had two of our sources
that were compromised

by someone unknown..

He was a general.

You can't get
any higher than that.

He was the most important
spy we'd ever had.

He was ex*cuted.

We were all in tears.

- And how do you put
a value on a human life?

- There's a handful of people
that would have had access

to the cases that were
compromised.

- We knew it was somebody we
were working with.

- We had his telephone tapped
at home and at work.

- There was no way that we were
going to fail.

- More would have been k*lled.

The last thing you want
to believe is that you've got

an American citizen who's
betraying his country.

- A mole.
- A mole inside the CIA.

In the FBI,
we make a lot of headlines.

Drug busts, mob stings.

t*rror1st takedowns.

We understand why people

want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it.
- Freeze!

- FBI.

- FBI!
- Action!

But they don't
know the half of it.

What really goes down?
We save that for each other,

when we're talking
agent to agent.

This is FBI. True.

- Sandy, in the mid eighties,

What was your role
in the Agency?

- I worked in the Soviet group
on the GRU officers

and the KGB officers.

Sandy Grimes
joined the CIA in 1967

and worked with double agents
who were spying on behalf
of the U.S. Government

- I was in charge of all
of our operations in Africa.

It was a wonderful place
to recruit Soviet and
East Europeans.

- I knew you were cool.

I didn't know
you were that cool.

Barry Colvert was
on the FBI's fugitive robbery

task force before becoming

a polygrapher in 1980, working
m*rder cases, terrorism,

white-collar crime
and espionage.

- So, Dell, tell me about
the start of your FBI career.

- I seemed to have a knack
for counterintelligence work,

looking for people who were
spying against the U.S.
Government

Dell Spry was
a deputy sheriff in Alabama,

before joining the bureau.

He worked white-collar crime
and counterespionage,

and was the FBI's liaison

to the CIA counterintelligence
center.

- What started the case?

Are you guys working together?

How did you know there
was a mole inside the CIA?

Cindy Coppola
is a 23-year veteran of the FB.

she worked on cases
that included organized crime

and terrorism and took part
in multinational investigations

into drug trafficking and money
laundering.

- It was 1985 that everything
began to go bad.

- Mister Gorbachev, tear down
this wall!

Tensions between
the U.S. and Soviet union reach

a fever pitch as both sides
deploy missiles in Europe.

- We had people starting
to get recalled.

In 1985, some
of America's most valuable
intelligence assets,

Soviets secretly working with
the U.S Government,

are suddenly called back
to Russia

and never heard from again.

We had two of our
sources Martynov--
Yes.

And Motorin, they were
FBI sources

that were compromised by
that time someone unknown.

A year later,
the CIA loses contact with major

General Dimitri Polyakov,
a priceless source in the GRU,

the Soviet intelligence
directorate.

- He was a general in the GRU.

You can't get
any higher than that .

He was the most important
spy we'd ever had.

And he really wanted
to help the United States.

He thought we just didn't have
any understanding

of the GRU and,
of course, the KGB too.

- He was an incredible
asset for this country.

Just unbelievably important.

And Sandy probably
won't say it, but I will.

That's one of the reasons
she was chosen

to be assigned
to work Polyakov.

She was responsible in large
part, analyzing

his information, providing
taskings for him.

All of that happened
because of Sandy Grimes.

- When we heard that Polyakov
had been arrested,

we were all in tears.

The Soviet secret
police are worried Polyakov

will swallow cyanide
to k*ll himself

and avoid t*rture in prison,

so they put him in a choke hol.

This sounds a little
odd.

He was a nice guy.

He was our hero.

He was ex*cuted.

- Besides Polyakov, there was
others that were missing
as well.

So, Dell, tell me about
Tolkachev.

- Tolkachev was an engineer
and knew a great deal

about weapons and how weapons
were designed and developed.

So he was a real significant
source for us about what was

Russia looking to in the future
as weapons development.

- So did he disappear as well?

- Yes, he was one of the ones
who disappeared post 1985.

The arrests
and executions can't
be coincidental.

Investigators from the FBI
and CIA

suspect there's a traitor
inside the Agency.

The last thing you want
to believe is that you've got

an American citizen who's
betraying his country

and that it is someone that you
sit next to at the office.

- A mole.

- A mole.
- What was the impetus that

brought you two together working
and then Barry

coming in later on?

- I was told by my supervisor
that headquarters wanted to talk

to me and I went
to headquarters.

And I was told we had
this special matter

coming over from the Agency.

He said: "we want you to be
the lead investigator
on this matter".

And I said: "Great,
what matter?"

And he said: "Well,
we can't tell you yet.

You got to get read in and
compartmented."

And that's when I became
a member of the task force.

The CIA is already
hunting for the mole.

but as a foreign intelligence
agency, they can't investigate
Americans on U.S. soil.

That's the job of the FBI.

- So you all are working
together to find

a potential mole within
the Agency.

Take me through those steps.
- We would go over to meet

in their counterintelligence
center with Jeanne and Dan Payne

and Sandy, we'd come over
to the Washington field office

and we would all get together
in the SCIF.

- Sure, I worked in them all
the time.

- You've been in them
so you know all about them.

If you could just imagine,
Cindy, the pressure of being

in this small room and I mean
literally 10 hours a day
at least.

And you can't, when you leave
that room,

you can't talk to anybody
about what you're doing.

The pressure was
just...it was enormous.

It was extremely difficult on me
and my wife

because I was working crazy
hours, and I get a phone call

in the middle of the night,
I'd have to get up and leave.

- Your weekends are never yours.

- And we also knew personally
there was no way

that we were going to fail.

Professionally, there
was no way we could fail.

More people would die.

You know, every
day was another gamble.

We're looking for someone now
who would sell out his country.

And we got. And I think Jeanne
was the one that said:

"okay, guys, everybody,
let's write down

our top three suspects".

- We knew it was somebody
we were working with.

- When Jeanne took up the cards,
Rick was one of the top three

on every card
- And who was that?

- Rick Ames.
- Rick Ames.

Aldrich Ames.
- Aldrich Ames.

To America's spy
masters, this couldn't be
a worse name.

Aldrich Ames has access
to the country's most vital
secrets.

Ames is a counterintelligence
officer in the CIA's Soviet and
Eastern European Division,

where he's privy to the Agencys
plans and operations

against the KBG and GRU.

- Rick and I carpooled.

- Are you kidding?

So tell me about that.

You lived near him
and you carpooled with him.

What was he like?
- Tall, gangly.

He always forgot to wash
his hair, comb it.

And he was late
every single time.

He was just goofy old Rick.

Thought he was
the smartest kid on the block.

- We thought there were others
that needed to be looked at,

but we agreed that Ames was
clearly the person to focus--

- Your number one choice.
- Yes.

We want to focus
our resources on.

As the CIA's assets
are being swept up
in the USSR...

Ames marries his second wife,
Rosario, and he suddenly

has money to spend, buying
luxury items, including

a new $43,000-dollar Jaguar.

- He bought a new house and
he wanted to show us all
the new house.

It was not a secret.

Because he said
that she, Rosario, had money.

- He was in your eyes,
living above his means.

But his answer to that was
it was his wife's money.

- Yes.

- I was the only polygraph
examiner in the Washington
office at the time,

so I'd handle almost all the spy
cases up till that time.

They said there's a handful
of people they would have

had access to the cases
that were compromised.

And they've all had
polygraph tests recently.

We want you to go to the Agency
and review their polygraph
charts.

And the first two were clear.
They were good charts.

And then when I got
to Rick Ames, he's not getting

through on the question about
money, but he gave them

an explanation, and the examiner
never tested him further.

So when I came back, I said:

"These two I don't have any
trouble with".

Do not clear Rick Ames.

Don't.

Don't take him off your radar.

- And I did review his polygraph
files as well.

This one CIA polygrapher
had written in the file.

"I am not accusing this person
of being a spy, but I would not

be surprised to find
that he's a spy."

- That's amazing that, that
would go through and not have

somebody go back and redo it.

- A lot of this information
about Rick

that was suspicious
was out there.

But until Sandy and others
started looking at it,

no one had ever put
anything together.

Everybody had a piece.

No one had the whole.

But it was our responsibility
to build an evidence base,

so we're trying to prove that
this guy betrayed his country.

So there were several techniques
that the bureau

had available to us.

We've got this
group called our SSGs.

- Sure, the SSG.

- We put the Gs on Rick.

It was pretty much 24/7
that we were surveilling Rick.

If he was in the district,
walking around on foot

with his wife, we were six steps
behind him.

If he was driving around
in his car or going anywhere,

we had cars all over him.

We had a airplane
that surveilled him.

We bugged his house.

We knew that he was
going to California.

And we had just a weekend
to execute a search warrant

that we didn't get from
a regular court

that we got from
a FISA court.

Our guys had already determined
weeks in advance

what type of lock Rick had

on his door and how
to defeat it.

No lights were turned on,
because Rick's neighbors

would have known that they were
out of town.

So these guys go in and they put
up that black tarp over

all the windows, using these
little pin lights to get around.

They found an operational note
that was going to be published

in The Washington Post want ads
that was to his handler.

And the message, whatever
the want ad was, would mean

something to you as the reader
of the want ad and something

entirely different to the KGB
handler.

That's just how
these guys communicate.

- Yeah.
- You're looking at phones.

You're doing surveillance.

Do you do any
type of trash covers?

- Yeah, we had a wonderful time
going through his trash

and that really was one of
the keys to this investigation

We had rented a house right
across the street from him

that we had put a video camera
on him.

We knew that the trash was
picked up on Tuesday mornings.

We got the trash can from
the house across the street

that we leased, and then we took
Rick's trashcan

back to the offsite.

Everybody had to put on their
government-approved OSHA

suits and our gloves and mask.

And then we started
digging through his garbage.

- Yeah.
- We're taking it out a layer

at a time, and we photograph
each layer as we take it out,

and that's so that we can put it
back into his trashcan

as exactly as we took it out.

Now, okay,
that sounds like overkill.

But we're dealing
with someone

we don't know how specialized
trained he was.

Now, every time before we go out
on Tuesday,

there was one of our Gs who went
by the street name of Hooker.

It was a guy.

And on this one occasion, we got
back to the offsite

and we're pulling all the trash
out and going through
everything.

And one of the SSGs, J.R.,
he starts getting these yellow

pieces of that sticky note
of paper.

- Yeah.

- And he starts putting
together. We all start walking.

Hooker comes over, and he goes:
"Man, kiss me. Kiss me."

I'm feeling a little lucky,

so I just start putting sugar
all over him at this point.

And sure enough, by the time
we get that note put together

the sticky, torn pieces, it was
an operational note

in Rick's handwriting
that he had written to his KGB

handler here in DC, saying
"unable to read Pipe," which was

the code name for one
of the dead drop sites.

And then he put: "will meet B"
and gave a date.

We pretty quickly figured out
that he was talking about
Bogota.

He's planning a trip
to Bogota.

Next, we put a group
on the plane with him,

who also plan a trip to Bogota.

They followed him and
they actually photographed him

meeting with his Moscow handler.

And then we, of course,
we're monitoring

his telephone
calls with Rosario.

The conversation was along
the lines of: "Did you do it?"

And he would say: "Of course
I did," or things like that.

The other thing
that we have to do is,

if you do get the money and
you think it might

be advisable, I would...
what I would do,

would be to leave
in cash..

You got the money
in dollars, right?

Investigators now
believe that Rosario

is in cahoots with her husband,
and is actively aiding

and abetting his espionage
activities.

- Probably one of the more
difficult things we were tasked
to do by both the CIA, the FBI,

and the National Security
Council and DOJ, they said:

"we want this gift wrapped"
and it was decided that

we were going to give to Rick
a legitimate top-secret document

that we knew for a fact
he would pass to the Russians

and we would have all
of our sources around him

to catch him in that dead
drop act.

And we know from some
of the other stuff that

he did give away that some of it
was really crucial

about our satellite program.

We videoed everything Rick did
through a pinhole camera

in his ceiling, in his office.

And I saw all the papers
that he looked through.

He looked at the page we wanted
him to pay attention to, read

the text that went with
the graph,

and then tossed it
in his outbox.

And to a man, we all went:

"Oh my God, if he doesn't think

they'll be interested in this,
what has he given them?"

- What year was it when
you had to make a decision?

Okay, we've got
enough information.

The U.S. Attorney's
office said this is it.

We need to...
- 1994.

It was...
we set it up for

President's Day,
February of 1994.

Ames is planning
on attending a work conference

in Moscow later that month.

Investigators fear he might
never return.

He was due to go out
of the country for CIA business

and we could not take the risk
of him leaving the country.

So the decision was made.

You got to take him down and
you got to take him down now.

- Yeah.

- More would have been k*lled.
- Yeah.

- Rick's supervisor, called Rick
to come into the office that day

on a holiday to work on a report
that only Rick

was intelligent
enough to put together.

And we believe
that would appeal to his ego.

And obviously it did.

When he was driving from
his house,

he came up to
a T-intersection

right around
the corner from his house.

So we set up our cars
at the stop sign

to where when Rick
pulled up behind us, he stopped.

We jump out of our car.

Mike Donner, who is
an excessively huge fellow,

he's Barry sized.

Mike grabbed Rick out of the car
and put his hands down

on the top of the car and did
a quick pat down

because we believed Rick
possibly might have

a weapon in the car.

And then I put the handcuffs
on him and told him

he was under
arrest for espionage.

And then we threw
him in the back.

Well, we didn't throw anybody.

- You know.

- We gently placed him
in the back seat of our car.

While we were in the car,
driving to the offsite,

our other team had gone
in to arrest Rosario.

- His wife.
- His wife, in their house.

And the behavioral sciences
people said: "make sure
that Rick

hears over your radio that y'all
were in his house searching it

and that his wife's got
on handcuffs, too."

Well.
- Good tactic.

- It just sucked
the life right out of him.

And then we took him
to an offsite that

the behavioral sciences people
at Quantico

had told us how to set up.

We had files with his name
on it, scattered on tables.

We had pictures of him
that the SSGs had taken.

We had pictures
of him in Bogota.

And when we brought Rick in and
sat him down,

he was really pretty much still
in a state of shock.

And he starts staring
at these pictures.

Not long after that,
they brought Rosario in.

She's got her hands cuffed
behind her back, and she looks

at him and she starts going:
"Rick, Rick!".

We take her, hurry her off
to another side room,

we didn't want to harshly
interrogate her.

We felt she was much more
susceptible to a softer

interview interrogation because
she was weeping.

She was extremely upset.

- Did you ever determine how
much money he got at any time?

- It was a substantial...
several million of dollars.

- Yeah.
- Plus a dacha on a river

Ames confesses that
his betrayals began back in 1985

he states that he's given up
"virtually all Soviet agents

he knows about, on United States
foreign, defense and security
policies."

By this time, Ames
has entered a plea, confessed.

He's got a sentence.

Life without parole.

Right off, he said: "I told
the FBI everything,

plus some stuff that they
wouldn't have known.

So I know what you're going
to ask."

And all the questions,
the main questions Ames failed.

I mean, big fails.

His failures were so clear,
I think he held back

some really good stuff
for whatever reason.

- And, Barry, you polygraphed
her as well?

They bring her
in after.

And the main issues with
Rosario is,

when did she know
what he was doing?

Had she been involved
in helping him

take an active part
in anything?

And she had trouble
with both of them.

- Sandy, when he was arrested,
how did that impact you?

What were your first thoughts
when you found out that day?

- It was wonderful.

I was thrilled.

He's an evil human being.

Period.

- The man is going
to spend his life...

- That's right.
- When he looks out the window

to see what the other side
looks like,

there'll be bars
on the window.

He hurt us so bad.

And how do you put
a value on a human life?

He had those 10 people ex*cuted.

To protect himself.

He was concerned that they would
become aware of his identity

and let the CIA know that he was
spying for the Russians,

so he methodically had them
recalled to Moscow

and ex*cuted just
for self-protection.

And that makes him the worst
traitor...

- Absolutely.
- ...in this nation's history.

And it's like:
"thank God, we got him."

We've stopped this guy,
and no one else is going to die.

I can go home now.
- Yes.