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Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti KGB USSR
Комитет государственной безопасности КГБ СССР
The KGB Sword-and-Shield emblem.
Agency overview
Formed	January 1, 1954; 58 years ago  (1954-01-01)
Dissolved	6 November 1991 (de facto) 3 December 1991 (de jure)
Superseding agency	Federal Security Service Foreign Intelligence Service
Jurisdiction	Council of Ministers of the USSR
Headquarters	Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union

The KGB (КГБ) is the commonly used acronym for the Russian:  Комитет государственной безопасности​ (help·info) (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security). It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time. While most of the KGB archives remain classified, two on-line documentary sources are available.^[1][2]

Since breaking away from Georgia de facto in the early 1990s with Russian help, South Ossetia established its own KGB (keeping this unreformed name).^[3] The State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the Russian name KGB.

Mode of operation[link]

A 1983 Time magazine article reported that the KGB was the world's most effective information-gathering organization.^[4] It operated legal and illegal espionage residencies in target countries where a legal resident gathered intelligence while based at the Soviet Embassy or Consulate, and, if caught, was protected from prosecution by diplomatic immunity. At best, the compromised spy either returned to the Soviet Union or was declared persona non grata and expelled by the government of the target country. The illegal resident spied, unprotected by diplomatic immunity, and worked independently of Soviet diplomatic and trade missions, (cf. the non-official cover CIA agent). In its early history, the KGB valued illegal spies more than legal spies, because illegal spies infiltrated their targets with greater ease. The KGB residency executed four types of espionage: (i) political, (ii) economic, (iii) military-strategic, and (iv) disinformation, effected with "active measures" (PR Line), counter-intelligence and security (KR Line), and scientific–technological intelligence (X Line); quotidian duties included SIGINT (RP Line) and illegal support (N Line).^[5]

The KGB classified its spies as agents (intelligence providers) and controllers (intelligence relayers). The false-identity or legend assumed by a USSR-born illegal spy was elaborate, using the life of either a "live double" (participant to the fabrication) or a "dead double" (whose identity is tailored to the spy). The agent then substantiated his or her legend by living it in a foreign country, before emigrating to the target country, thus the sending of US-bound illegal residents via the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada. Tradecraft included stealing and photographing documents, code-names, contacts, targets, and dead letter boxes, and working as a "friend of the cause" or agents provocateur, who would infiltrate the target group to sow dissension, influence policy, and arrange kidnappings and assassinations.^{[citation needed]}

History[link]

The Cheka was established to defend the October Revolution and the nascent Bolshevik state from its enemies—principally the monarchist White Army. To ensure the Bolshevik regime's survival, the Cheka suppressed counter-revolutionary activity with domestic terror and international deception. The scope of foreign intelligence operations prompted Lenin to authorise the Cheka's creation of the INO (Innostranyi Otdel—Foreign-intelligence Department)—the precursor to the First Chief Directorate (FCD) of the KGB. In 1922, Lenin's regime renamed the Cheka as the State Political Directorate (OGPU).^[6]

The OGPU expanded Soviet espionage nationally and internationally, and provided Joseph Stalin with his head personal bodyguard: Nikolai Vlasik. The vagaries of Stalin's paranoia influenced the OGPU's performance and direction in the 1930s, i.e. Trotskyist conspiracies. Acting as his own analyst, Stalin unwisely subordinated intelligence analysis to intelligence collection. Eventually, reports pandered to his conspiracy fantasies. The middle history of the KGB culminates in the Great Purge (1936–1938) killings of civil, military, and government people deemed politically unreliable. Among those executed were NKVD chairmen Genrikh Yagoda (1938) and Nikolai Yezhov (1940); later, Lavrentiy Beria (1953) followed suit. Ironically, Yezhov denounced Yagoda for executing the Great Terror, which from 1937 to 1938 is called Yezhovshchina, the especially cruel "Yezhov era".^[7]

In 1941, under Chairman Lavrentiy Beria, the OGPU became the NKGB (People's Commissariat for State Security, integral to the NKVD) and recovered from the Great Purge of the thirties. Yet, the NKGB unwisely continued pandering to Stalin's conspiracy fantasies—whilst simultaneously achieving its deepest penetrations of the West. Next, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov centralised the intelligence agencies, re-organising the NKGB as the KI (Komitet Informatsii—Committee of Information), composed (1947–51) of the MGB (Ministry for State Security) and the GRU (Foreign military Intelligence Directorate). In practice making an ambassador head of the MGB and GRU legal residencies in his embassy; intelligence operations were under political control; the KI ended when Molotov incurred Stalin's disfavor. Despite its political end, the KI's contribution to Soviet intelligence was reliant upon illegal residents—spies able to establish a more secure base of operations in the target country.^[8]

The Jubilee Congress 70 years KGB USSR. (1987)

Moreover, expecting to succeed Joseph Stalin as leader of the USSR, the ambitious head of the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), Lavrentiy Beria, merged the MGB and the MVD on Stalin's death in 1953. Anticipating a coup d'etat, the Presidium swiftly eliminated Beria with treasonous charges of "criminal anti-Party and anti-state activities" and executed him. In the event, the MGB was renamed KGB, detached from the MVD, and demoted from Cabinet to Committee level.

Mindful of ambitious spy chiefs—and after deposing Premier Nikita Khrushchev—Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and the CPSU knew to manage the next over-ambitious KGB Chairman, Aleksandr Shelepin (1958–61), who facilitated Brezhnev's palace coup d'état against Khrushchev in 1964 (despite Shelepin not then being in KGB). With political reassignments, Shelepin protégé Vladimir Semichastny (1961–67) was sacked as KGB Chairman, and Shelepin, himself, was demoted from chairman of the Committee of Party and State Control to Trade Union Council chairman.

In the 1980s, the glasnost liberalisation of Soviet society provoked KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov (1988–91) to lead the August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev. The thwarted coup d'état ended the KGB on 6 November 1991. The KGB's successors are the secret police agency FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and the espionage agency SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service).

KGB in the US[link]

The World War Interregnum[link]

The GRU (military intelligence) recruited the ideological agents Julian Wadleigh and Alger Hiss, who became State Department diplomats in 1936. The NKVD's first US operation was establishing the legal residency of Boris Bazarov and the illegal residency of Iskhak Akhmerov in 1934.^[9] Throughout, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its Gen.-Sec'y Earl Browder, helped NKVD recruit Americans, working in government, business, and industry.

Other important, high-level ideological agents were the diplomats Laurence Duggan and Michael Whitney Straight in the State Department, the statistician Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, the economist Lauchlin Currie (an FDR advisor), and the "Silvermaster Group", headed by statistician Greg Silvermaster, in the Farm Security Administration and the Board of Economic Warfare.^[10] Moreover, when Whittaker Chambers, formerly Alger Hiss's courier, approached the Roosevelt Government—to identify the Soviet spies Duggan, White, and others—he was ignored. Hence, during the Second World War (1939–45)—at the Teheran (1943), Yalta (1945), and Potsdam (1945) conferences—Big Three Ally Joseph Stalin of the USSR, was better-informed about the war affairs of his US and UK allies, than they about his.^[11]

Soviet espionage succeeded most in collecting scientific and technologic intelligence about advances in jet propulsion, radar, and encryption, which impressed Moscow, but stealing atomic secrets was the capstone of NKVD espionage against Anglo–American science and technology. To wit, British Manhattan Project team physicist Klaus Fuchs (GRU 1941) was the main agent of the Rosenberg spy ring.^{[citation needed]} In 1944, the New York City residency infiltrated the top secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, by recruiting Theodore Hall, a nineteen-year-old Harvard physicist.

During the Cold War[link]

The KGB failed to rebuild most of its US illegal resident networks. The aftermath of the Second Red Scare (1947–57), McCarthyism, and the destruction of the CPUSA hampered recruitment. The last major illegal resident, Rudolf Abel ("Willie" Vilyam Fisher), was betrayed by his assistant, Reino Häyhänen, in 1957.

Recruitment then emphasised mercenary agents, an approach especially successful^{[citation needed][quantify]} in scientific and technical espionage—because private industry practiced lax internal security, unlike the US Government. In late 1967, the notable KGB success was the walk-in recruitment of US Navy Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker who individually and via the Walker Spy Ring for eighteen years enabled Soviet Intelligence to decipher some one million US Navy messages, and track the US Navy.^[12]

In the late Cold War, the KGB was lucky with intelligence coups with the cases of the mercenary walk-in recruits, FBI counterspy Robert Hanssen (1979–2001) and CIA Soviet Division officer Aldrich Ames (1985).^[13]

KGB in the Soviet Bloc[link]

Russian President Vladimir Putin worked extensively in Dresden, East Germany during the 1980s.

It was Cold War policy for the KGB of the Soviet Union and the secret services of the satellite-states to extensively monitor public and private opinion, internal subversion, and possible revolutionary plots in the Soviet Bloc. In supporting those Communist governments, the KGB was instrumental in crushing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the Prague Spring of "Socialism with a Human Face", in 1968 Czechoslovakia.

During the Hungarian revolt, KGB chairman Ivan Serov, personally supervised the post-invasion "normalization" of the country. In consequence, KGB monitored the satellite-state populations for occurrences of "harmful attitudes" and "hostile acts;" yet, stopping the Prague Spring, deposing a nationalist Communist government, was its greatest achievement.

The KGB prepared the Red Army's route by infiltrating to Czechoslovakia many illegal residents disguised as Western tourists. They were to gain the trust of and spy upon the most outspoken proponents of Alexander Dubček's new government. They were to plant subversive evidence, justifying the USSR's invasion, that right-wing groups—aided by Western intelligence agencies—were going to depose the Communist government of Czechoslovakia. Finally, the KGB prepared hardline, pro-USSR members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), such as Alois Indra and Vasil Biľak, to assume power after the Red Army's invasion.^{[citation needed]}

The KGB's Czech success in the 1960s was matched with the failed suppression of the Solidarity labour movement in 1980s Poland. The KGB had forecast political instability consequent to the election of Archbishop of Kraków Karol Wojtyla, as the first Polish Pope, John Paul II, whom they had categorised as "subversive," because of his anti-Communist sermons against the one-party PUWP régime. Despite its accurate forecast of crisis, the Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP) hindered the KGB's destroying the nascent Solidarity-backed political movement, fearing explosive civil violence if they imposed the KGB-recommended martial law. Aided by their Polish counterpart, the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB), the KGB successfully infiltrated spies to Solidarity and the Catholic Church^{[citation needed]}, and in Operation X co-ordinated the declaration of martial law with Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski and the Polish Communist Party;^{[citation needed][dubious – discuss]} however, the vacillating, conciliatory Polish approach blunted KGB effectiveness—and Solidarity then fatally weakened the Communist Polish government in 1989.

Suppressing internal dissent[link]

Monument to KGB victims, Vilnius, Lithuania.

During the Cold War, the KGB actively suppressed "ideological subversion"—unorthodox political and religious ideas and the espousing dissidents. In 1967, the suppression increased under new KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov.

After denouncing Stalinism in his secret speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences (1956), Nikita Khrushchev lessened suppression of "ideological subversion". Resultantly, critical literature re-emerged, notably the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; however, after Khrushchev's deposition in 1964, Leonid Brezhnev reverted the State and KGB to actively harsh suppression—routine house searches to seize documents and the continual monitoring of dissidents. To wit, in 1965, such a search-and-seizure operation yielded Solzhenitsyn (code-name PAUK, "spider") manuscripts of "slanderous fabrications", and the subversion trial of the novelists Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel; Sinyavsky (alias "Abram Tertz"), and Daniel (alias "Nikolai Arzhak"), were captured after a Moscow literary-world informant told KGB when to find them at home.

After suppressing the Prague Spring, KGB Chairman Andropov established the Fifth Directorate to monitor dissension and eliminate dissenters. He was especially concerned with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, "Public Enemy Number One".^[14] Andropov failed to expel Solzhenitsyn before 1974; but did internally exile Sakharov to Gorky city [Nizhny Novgorod] in 1980. KGB failed to prevent Sakharov's collecting his Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, but did prevent Yuri Orlov collecting his Nobel Prize in 1978; Chairman Andropov supervised both operations.

KGB dissident-group infiltration featured agents provocateur pretending "sympathy to the cause", smear campaigns against prominent dissidents, and show trials; once imprisoned, the dissident endured KGB interrogators and sympathetic informant cell-mates. In the event, Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policies lessened persecution of dissidents; he was effecting some of the policy changes they had been demanding since the 1970s.^[15]

Notable Operations[link]

Former head of Azerbaijan SSR KGB Heydar Aliyev, ex–Azerbaijani President

• With the Trust Operation, the OGPU successfully deceived some leaders of the right-wing, counter-revolutionary White Guards back to the USSR for execution.
• NKVD infiltrated and destroyed Trotskyist groups; in 1940, the Spanish agent Ramón Mercader assassinated Leon Trotsky in Mexico City.
• KGB favoured active measures (e.g. disinformation), in discrediting the USSR's enemies.
• For war-time, KGB had ready sabotage operations arms caches in target countries.

In the 1960s, acting upon the information of KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, the CIA counter-intelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, believed KGB had moles in two key places—the counter-intelligence section of CIA and the FBI's counter-intelligence department—through whom they would know of, and control, US counter-espionage to protect the moles and hamper the detection and capture of other Communist spies. Moreover, KGB counter-intelligence vetted foreign intelligence sources, so that the moles might "officially" approve an anti-CIA double agent as trustworthy. In retrospect, the captures of the moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, proved Angleton—ignored as over-cautious—was correct, despite costing him his job at CIA, which he left in 1975.^{[citation needed]}

In the mid-1970s, the KGB tried to secretly buy three banks in northern California to gain access to high-technology secrets. Their efforts, however, were thwarted by the CIA. The banks were Peninsula National Bank in Burlingame, the First National Bank of Fresno, and the Tahoe National Bank in South Lake Tahoe. These banks had made numerous loans to advanced technology companies and had many of their officers and directors as clients. The KGB used the Moscow Narodny Bank Limited to finance the acquisition, and an intermediary, Singaporean businessman Amos Dawe, as the frontman.^[16]

[edit] August Coup of 1991

On August 18, 1991 the Chairman of the KGB Vladimir Kryuchkova and 7 other Soviet leaders, the State Committee on the State of Emergency, attempted to overthrow the government of the Soviet Union. The purpose of the attempted coup d'état was to preserve the integrity of the Soviet Union and the constitutional order. President Mikhail Gorbachev was arrested and ineffective attempts made to seize power. Within two days, by 20 August 1991, the attempted coup collapsed.

Organization of the KGB[link]

The Chairman of the KGB, First Deputy Chairmen (1–2), Deputy Chairmen (4–6). Its policy Collegium comprised a chairman, deputy chairmen, directorate chiefs, and republican KGB chairmen.

The Directorates[link]

• First Chief Directorate (Foreign Operations) – foreign espionage.
• Second Chief Directorate – counter-intelligence, internal political control.
• Third Chief Directorate (Armed Forces) – military counter-intelligence and armed forces political surveillance.
• Fourth Directorate (Transportation security)
• Fifth Chief Directorate – censorship and internal security against artistic, political, and religious dissension; renamed "Directorate Z", protecting the Constitutional order, in 1989.
• Sixth Directorate (Economic Counter-intelligence, industrial security)
• Seventh Directorate (Surveillance) – of Soviet nationals and foreigners.
• Eighth Chief Directorate – monitored-managed national, foreign, and overseas communications, cryptologic equipment, and research and development.
• Ninth Directorate (Guards and KGB Protection Service) - The 40,000-man uniformed bodyguard for the CPSU leaders and families, guarded critical government installations (nuclear weapons, etc.), operated the Moscow VIP subway, and secure Government–Party telephony. Pres. Yeltsin transformed it to the Federal Protective Service (FPS).
• Fifteenth Directorate (Security of Government Installations)
• Sixteenth Directorate (SIGINT and communications interception) - operated the national and government telephone and telegraph systems.
• Border Guards Directorate responsible for the USSR's border troops.
• Operations and Technology Directorate – research laboratories for recording devices and Laboratory 12 for poisons and drugs.

Other Units[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

• KGB Personnel Department
• Secretariat of the KGB
• KGB Technical Support Staff
• KGB Finance Department
• KGB Archives
• KGB Irregulars
• Administration Department of the KGB, and
• The CPSU Committee.
• KGB Spetsnaz (special operations) units such as:

• The Alpha Group
• The Vympel, etc.

• Kremlin Guard Force for the Presidium, et al., then became the FPS.

History of the KGB[link]

Insignia[link]

See also[link]

Soviet Union portal

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, Gardners Books (2000) ISBN 0-14-028487-7; Basic Books (1999) ISBN 0-465-00310-9; trade (2000) ISBN 0-465-00312-5
• Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, Basic Books (2005) ISBN 0-465-00311-7
• John Barron, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents, Reader's Digest Press (1974) ISBN 0-88349-009-9
• Amy Knight, The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union, Unwin Hyman (1990) ISBN 0-04-445718-9
• Richard C.S. Trahair and Robert Miller, Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies, and Secret Operations, Enigma Books (2009) ISBN 978-1-929631-75-9

Further reading[link]

• Солженицын, А.И. (1990). Архипелаг ГУЛАГ: 1918 - 1956. Опыт художественного исследования. Т. 1 - 3. Москва: Центр "Новый мир". (in Russian)
• Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia — Past, Present, and Future Farrar Straus Giroux (1994) ISBN 0-374-52738-5.
• John Barron, KGB: The Secret Works of Soviet Secret Agents Bantam Books (1981) ISBN 0-553-23275-4
• Vadim J. Birstein. The Perversion Of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science. Westview Press (2004) ISBN 0-8133-4280-5
• John Dziak Chekisty: A History of the KGB, Lexington Books (1988) ISBN 978-0-669-10258-1
• Sheymov, Victor (1993). Tower of Secrets. Naval Institute Press. pp. 420. ISBN 1-55750-764-3. 
• (Russian) Бережков, Василий Иванович (2004). Руководители Ленинградского управления КГБ : 1954-1991. Санкт-Петербург: Выбор, 2004. ISBN 5-93518-035-9
• Кротков, Юрий (1973). «КГБ в действии». Published in «Новый журнал» №111, 1973 (in Russian)
• Рябчиков, С.В. (2011). Заметки по истории Кубани (материалы для хрестоматии) // Вiсник Мiжнародного дослiдного центру "Людина: мова, культура, пiзнання", 2011, т. 30(3), с. 25-45. (in Russian)

http://independent.academia.edu/SergeiRjabchikov/Papers/1322526/Zametki_po_istorii_Kubani_materialy_dlya_khrestomatii_

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: KGB

• For Cold War KGB activity in the US, see Alexander Vassiliev's Notebooks from the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP)
• KGB Information Center, Federation of American Scientists
• Viktor M. Chebrikov et al., eds. Istoriya sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti ("History of the Soviet Organs of State Security"). (1977), www.fas.harvard.edu
• (Russian) Slaves of KGB. 20th Century. The religion of betrayal, by Yuri Shchekochikhin

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Aldrich Ames
Aldrich Ames
Born	(1941-05-26) May 26, 1941 (age 71) River Falls, Wisconsin, United States
Charge(s)	18 U.S.C. § 794(c)[1] (Espionage Act)
Penalty	life imprisonment (without parole)
Status	Incarcerated
Occupation	former CIA officer and analyst and agent for the Soviet Union and later Russia
Spouse	Nancy Segebarth(div.) Rosario Dupuy
Parents	Carleton Cecil Ames Rachel Aldrich Ames

Aldrich Hazen Ames (born May 26, 1941) is a former Central Intelligence Agency counter-intelligence officer and analyst, who, in 1994, was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. Until the arrest of Robert Hanssen seven years later, Ames compromised more CIA assets than any Soviet mole in American history.

While spending nine years working in CIA counter-intelligence, he declared an annual income of $60,000 but his plastic spending of up to $30,000 a month funded a lifestyle that included a new Jaguar and a $540,000 house (2011 value: $800,000) paid for in cash. ^[2]

Biography[link]

Early life and work[link]

Aldrich Ames was born in River Falls, Wisconsin, to Carleton Cecil Ames and Rachel Ames (née Aldrich). His father was a college lecturer, his mother a high school English teacher. Aldrich was the eldest of three children and the only son. In 1952 Carleton Ames began working for CIA's Directorate of Operations in Virginia, and in 1953 he was posted to Southeast Asia for three years accompanied by his family. Carleton received a "particularly negative performance appraisal" in part because of a serious drinking problem and spent the remainder of his career at CIA Headquarters.^[3]

Ames attended high school at McLean High School in McLean, Virginia. Beginning in 1957, following his sophomore year, Ames worked for the CIA for three summers as a low-ranking (GS-3) records analyst, marking classified documents for filing. In 1959, Ames entered the University of Chicago planning to study foreign cultures and history, but his "long-time passion" for drama resulted in failing grades, and he did not finish out his sophomore year. Ames worked at the CIA during the summer of 1960 as a laborer/painter. He then became an assistant technical director at a Chicago theater until February 1962. Returning to Washington area, Ames took full-time employment at the CIA doing the same sort of clerical jobs he had performed in high school.^[4]

CIA career[link]

Five years later, Ames completed a bachelor's degree in history at George Washington University. Ames did not originally plan to make his career with the CIA, but after attaining the grade of GS-7, and having received good performance appraisals, Ames was accepted into the Career Trainee Program despite several alcohol-related brushes with the police.^[5]

In 1969 Ames married fellow officer Nancy Segebarth, whom he had met in the Career Trainee Program. When Ames was assigned to Ankara, Turkey, Nancy had to resign from the CIA because of a rule that prohibited married partners from working as officers from the same office.^[6]

Ames' job in Turkey was to target Soviet intelligence officers for recruitment, and he succeeded in infiltrating the Communist DEV-GENÇ organization through a roommate of student activist Deniz Gezmiş.^[7] In spite of this success, Ames' performance was rated only "satisfactory," and Ames, discouraged by the critical assessment, considered leaving the CIA.^[8]

In 1972, Ames returned to CIA headquarters where he spent the next four years in the Soviet-East European (SE) Division. His performance reviews were "generally enthusiastic," apparently because he was better at managing paper work and planning field operations than at agent recruiting. Nevertheless, his excessive drinking was also noted, and two "eyes only" memorandums were placed in his file.^[9]

In 1976 Ames was assigned to New York City where he handled two important Soviet assets. His performance was excellent, and Ames received several promotions and bonuses and was ranked above most operations officers in his pay grade, although his tendency to procrastinate in submissions of financial accounting was noted. Ames' inattention to details also led him to make two important security violations, including once leaving a briefcase of classified operational materials on the subway. Ames apparently received only a verbal reprimand.^[10]

In 1981 Ames accepted a posting to Mexico City while his wife remained in New York. His evaluations in Mexico were mediocre at best, and he also engaged in at least three extramarital affairs. In October 1982 Ames began an affair with María del Rosario Casas Dupuy, a cultural attaché in the Colombian Embassy and a CIA informant. Despite CIA regulations, Ames did not report his romance with a foreign national to his superiors, even though some of his colleagues were well aware of it. Ames' lackluster performance reviews were in part the result of heavy drinking. At a diplomatic reception in Mexico City, Ames got into a loud, drunken argument with a Cuban official that "caused alarm" among his superiors.^[11]

Nevertheless, in September 1983, the CIA assigned Ames back to the SE division in Washington, placing him "in the most sensitive element" of the Department of Operations because it was responsible for Soviet counterintelligence activities. Ames had access to all CIA plans and operations against the KGB and the GRU, Soviet military intelligence.^[12]

In October he formally separated from his wife, and in November, he submitted an "outside activity" report to the CIA noting his romantic relationship to Rosario. As part of his divorce settlement, Ames agreed to pay the couple's debts plus provide his wife monthly support for three-and-a-half years, a total of about $46,000. Ames thought the divorce might bankrupt him, and he later said that this financial pressure first led him to consider spying for the Soviet Union.^[12] Rosario also proved to be a heavy spender—after her arrest the FBI discovered in the Ames' house sixty purses, more than five hundred pairs of shoes, and 165 unopened boxes of pantyhose.^[13]

Espionage[link]

Ames routinely assisted another CIA office that assessed Soviet embassy officials as potential intelligence assets. As part of this responsibility, and with the knowledge of both the CIA and the FBI, Ames began making contacts within the Soviet Embassy. In April 1985, Ames provided information to the Soviets that he believed was "essentially valueless" but that would establish his credentials as a CIA insider. He also asked for $50,000, which the Soviets quickly paid.^[14]

Ames later claimed that he had not prepared for more than the initial "con game" to satisfy his immediate indebtedness, but once having "crossed a line," he "could never step back." Ames soon identified more than ten top-level CIA and FBI sources who were reporting on Soviet activities. Not only did Ames believe that there was "as much money as [he] could ever use" in betraying these intelligence assets, but their elimination would also reduce the chance of his own espionage being discovered.^[15]

By 1985, the CIA's network of Soviet-bloc agents began disappearing at an alarming rate. The CIA realized something was wrong, but was reluctant to consider the possibility of an agency mole. Initial investigations focused on possible breaches caused by Soviet bugs or by a broken code.^[16]

The CIA then blamed asset losses on another former CIA agent, Edward Lee Howard, who had also been passing information to the Soviets. But when the CIA lost three other important sources of information about whom Howard could have known nothing, it was clear that the arrests (and executions) originated from another source.^[17]

As one CIA officer put it, the Soviets "were wrapping up our cases with reckless abandon," which was highly unusual because the "prevailing wisdom among the Agency's professional 'spy catchers'" was that suddenly eliminating all the assets known to the mole would put him in danger. In fact, Ames' KGB handlers apologized to him but said the decision to immediately eliminate all American assets had been made at the highest political levels.^[18]

Meanwhile, Ames continued to meet openly with his contact at the Russian embassy, Sergey Dmitriyevich Chuvakhin, and for a time, Ames summarized for the CIA and FBI the progress of what he portrayed as an attempt to recruit the Soviet. In fact, Ames received $20,000-50,000 every time the two had lunch.^[19] Ultimately, Ames received $4.6 million from the Soviets, which allowed him to enjoy a lifestyle well beyond the means of a CIA officer.^[16]

When, in August 1985, Ames's divorce became final, he immediately married María del Rosario. Understanding that his new wealth would raise eyebrows, he developed a cover story that his prosperity was the result of money given him by his Colombian wife's wealthy family.^[20]

Ames was posted to Rome in 1986. There his performance once again ranged from mediocre to poor, and included evidence of problem drinking. Nevertheless, in 1990-91, Ames was reassigned to the CIA's Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group, providing him with access to "extremely sensitive data," including information on U.S. double agents.^[21]

CIA response[link]

Replacement of the mailbox used by Ames: a horizontal chalk mark above the USPS logo would signal a needed meeting. 37th and R Sts. NW. Original in the Spy Museum.

By 1990, the CIA was certain that there was a mole in the agency. Recruitment of new Soviet agents came to a virtual halt from fear that the agency could not protect its current assets.^[16]

Prior to this, in November 1989, a fellow employee reported that Ames seemed to be enjoying a lifestyle well beyond the means of a CIA officer and that his wife's family was less wealthy than he had claimed. Nevertheless, the CIA moved slowly. When the investigator assigned to Ames's finances began a two-month training course, no one immediately replaced him.^[22] Investigators were also diverted by a false story from a CIA officer abroad who claimed that the Soviets had penetrated the CIA with an employee born in the USSR.^[23]

In 1986 and 1991, Ames passed two polygraph examinations while spying for the Soviet Union and Russia, respectively. Ames was initially "terrified" at the prospect of taking the test, but he was advised by the KGB "to just relax."^[24] Ames's test demonstrated deceptive answers to some questions but the examiners passed him, perhaps in the later opinion of the CIA because the examiners were "overly friendly" and therefore did not induce the proper physiological response.^[25]

The CIA finally focused on Ames after it realized that on a $60,000 salary, Ames was able to afford these expenses:

• A $540,000 house in Arlington, Virginia, paid for in cash;^[26]
• A $50,000 Jaguar automobile;^[27]
• Home remodeling and redecoration costs of $99,000;^[26]
• Monthly phone bills exceeding $6,000, mostly calls by Ames's wife to her family in Bogotá, Colombia;
• Tailored suits that replaced Ames's former 'bargain basement' clothes, conspicuously finer than those of his CIA colleagues; and
• Premium credit cards whose minimum monthly payment exceeded his monthly salary.^[28]

Arrest[link]

Ames' mug shot, taken on the day of his arrest

Finally in March 1993 the CIA and FBI began an intensive investigation of Ames that included electronic surveillance, combing through his trash, and a monitor installed in his car to track his movements.^[29] From November 1993 until his arrest, Ames was kept under virtually constant physical surveillance. When in early 1994 he was scheduled to attend a conference in Moscow, the FBI believed it could wait no longer, and he and his wife were arrested on February 21, 1994.^[30] At arrest, Ames told the officers, "You're making a big mistake! You must have the wrong man!"^[31]

On February 22, 1994, Ames and his wife were formally charged by the United States Department of Justice with spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. Ames could have faced the death penalty because his betrayal had resulted in the deaths of a number of CIA assets.^[32] However, he pleaded guilty on April 28 and received a sentence of life imprisonment. His wife received a 5-year prison sentence for tax evasion and conspiracy to commit espionage as part of a plea-bargain by Ames.^[33]

In court, Ames admitted that he had compromised "virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me" and had provided the USSR and Russia with a "huge quantity of information on United States foreign, defense and security policies."^[34] It is estimated that information Ames provided to the Soviets led to the compromise of at least a hundred U.S. intelligence operations and to the execution of at least ten U.S. sources.

Ames said he was not afraid of being caught by the FBI or CIA but was afraid of Soviet defectors, saying, "Virtually every American who has been jailed in connection with espionage has been fingered by a Soviet sources." Additionally, when asked about the polygraph tests, Ames said, "There's no special magic...Confidence is what does it. Confidence and a friendly relationship with the examiner... rapport, where you smile and you make him think that you like him. ^[35]

Post sentence[link]

Ames is Federal Bureau of Prisons prisoner #40087-083, serving his sentence in the high-security Allenwood U.S. Penitentiary near Allenwood, Pennsylvania.^[36]

The CIA was criticized for not focusing on Ames sooner, given the obvious increase in his standard of living;^[16] and there was a "huge uproar" in Congress when CIA director James Woolsey decided that no one in the CIA would be dismissed or demoted at the agency. "Some have clamored for heads to roll in order that we could say that heads have rolled," Woolsey declared. "Sorry, that's not my way." Woolsey was forced to resign.^[37]

Ames's attorney, Plato Cacheris, had threatened to litigate the legality of FBI searches and seizures in Ames's home and office without traditional search warrants, although Ames's guilty plea made the threat moot. Congress then passed a new law giving the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that specific power.^[38]

Ames' story is dramatized in the 1998 movie Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within, starring Timothy Hutton as Ames. Ames was also included as a character in the 1997 Frederick Forsyth novel Icon, in which he betrays several Soviet agents recruited by the United States.^[39]

Some CIA sources betrayed[link]

• Vitaly Yurchenko was a KGB officer in the Fifth Department of Directorate K, "the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect to the United States".^[40] In August 1985, he defected via Rome to the US,^[41] only to repatriate to the Soviet Union three months later.^[42] Ames was privy to all information that Yurchenko gave to the CIA and was able to transmit it to the KGB, which allowed easy cover-ups of lost information.^[43] Yurchenko returned to the Soviet Union in 1985 and was re-assigned to a desk job within the FCD, a reward for helping to keep Ames' spying a secret.^[44]

• In the mid-1980s, Major General Dmitri Polyakov was the highest ranking figure in Soviet military intelligence (GRU) giving information to the CIA. He was executed in 1988 after Ames exposed him.^[45] He was probably the most valuable asset compromised by Ames. One CIA official said of Polyakov, "He didn't do this for money. He insisted on staying in place to help us."^[46]

• Colonel Oleg Gordievsky was the head of the London rezidentura (residency) and spied for the SIS (MI6). Ames handed over information about Gordievsky that positively identified him as a traitor,^[47] although he managed to escape to the Finnish border where he was extracted to the United Kingdom via Norway by the British SIS before he could be detained in Russia.

• Valery Martynov was a Line X (Technical&Scientific Intelligence) officer at the Washington rezidentura. Martynov revealed the identities of fifty Soviet intelligence officers operating out of the embassy plus technical and scientific targets that the KGB had penetrated.^[48] Ames turned over Martynov's name to the KGB, and he was executed.^[49]

• Major Sergei Motorin was a Line PR (Political Intelligence) officer at the Washington rezidentura whom the FBI tried to blackmail into spying for the US. He eventually cooperated for his own reasons.^[50] Motorin was one of two moles at the rezidentura betrayed by Ames and then quickly executed.^[49][51]

• Colonel Leonid Polishchuk was a Line KR (Counter-intelligence) agent in Nigeria. He too was betrayed by Ames. His arrest was attributed to a chance encounter where KGB agents had observed a CIA agent loading a dead drop. After some time, Polishchuk was seen removing the contents.^[52]

• Sergey Fedorenko was a nuclear arms expert assigned to the Soviet delegation to the United Nations. In 1987, Ames was assigned to handle him, and Fedorenko betrayed information about the Soviet missile program to Ames. The two men became good friends, hugging when Fedorenko was about to return to Moscow. "We had become close friends," said Ames. "We trusted each other completely."^[53] Ames was initially hesitant to betray his friend, but soon after handing over the majority of the information, he decided to also betray Fedorenko to "do a good job" for the KGB.^[51] Back in the USSR, Fedorenko used political connections to get himself out of trouble. Years later, Fedorenko met his friend Ames for an emotional reunion over lunch and promised to move to the U.S. for good. Ames promised to help. Shortly after lunch, Ames betrayed him to the KGB for a second time.^[51] Fedorenko escaped arrest, defected, and is currently living in Rhode Island.^[54]

See also[link]

Biography portal

Other Agents in place in the U.S. Government or Military who worked as a Mole for either the KGB or the SVR, include:

• James Hall III - An Army warrant officer and intelligence analyst in Germany who sold eavesdropping and code secrets to East Germany and the Soviet Union from 1983 to 1988.
• Robert Hanssen - Arrested for spying for the Soviet Union and Russia for more than 15 of his 27 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
• Earl Edwin Pitts - An FBI agent charged with providing Top Secret documents to the Soviet Union and then Russia from 1987 until 1992.
• Harold James Nicholson - A senior-ranking Central Intelligence Agency officer arrested while attempting to take Top Secret documents out of the country. He began spying for Russia in 1994.
• George Trofimoff - A then retired Army Reserve colonel, charged in June 2000 of spying for the KGB and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (or SVR) for over 25 years.
• William Kampiles - A CIA clerk who sold a KH-11 spy satellite manual to the Soviet Union.
• David Henry Barnett - A CIA officer convicted of spying for the Soviet Union in 1980. He volunteered to spy in 1976.
• John Anthony Walker - A Navy Warrant Officer convicted of providing massive amounts of classified information to the USSR during his Naval career. Several members of his family were involved in his spying activities as well.

References[link]