ALDRICH AMES, MY WOULD-BE KILLER

Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB station chief

in London, who also worked for MI6, says that the CIA was a soft target for a traitor

I SAT opposite Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer who is now under arrest for spying for the Russians, several times. As a senior officer in Soviet counter-espionage, he was there, quietly and patiently listening, at a number of my debriefings in Washington. I liked him more than most of the other CIA officers I encountered. His face radi- ated gentleness and kindness.

That was a surprise: CIA officers are generally hard and forceful in manner, without illusions about people or politics. I was disappointed to discover they shared many of the characteristics of KGB offi- cers: they can be excessively deferential to authority, and frightened of saying any- thing they think might upset their boss behaviour which I haven't noticed (or at least not to the same extent) in the British Secret Service. In America, they work pointlessly long hours: just as in the KGB, so long as the boss's light is on, the subor- dinates keep working, even if they don't really have anything to do. As soon he quits for the day, the minions leave.

Ames seemed different. In fact, I was so impressed by him that I thought that I had encountered the embodiment of American values: here was the openness, honesty and decency of which I had heard so much. Of course I didn't know at that point that he had been trying to kill me. When I first appeared at the meeting with him in Washington, I must have seemed like a ghost risen from the dead. I believe that I was the first source he betrayed. He received his first payment from the KGB on 18 May 1985, the day after I was recalled to Moscow for interroga- tion.

He wouldn't have known my name at that time, but he would have heard about the kind of information that was coming from me. It would not have been difficult for him to work out that the British had a very important and knowledgeable KGB source with a Scandinavian background working in London. There was only one officer in the London office who fitted the bill: me.

Ames would have known exactly what he was doing in betraying the information: he was sentencing the victim to death. He knew any important source he passed on to the Russians would be shot — and most were. He has the blood of a dozen officers on his hands. He would have had my blood, too, had I not managed to escape before the KGB had any evidence (other than Ames's tip-off) against me.

So when I turned up in Washington, sit- ting at the table opposite him, he must have been a little surprised. If he was, he didn't show it. Not one breath of nervous- ness escaped from him. Newspaper reports have portrayed him as a craven wimp ordered about by his wife. I can tes- tify from personal experience that he must have an extraordinary amount of mental toughness. I've been in that situation: you attend meetings, you go for a drink, you chat in the corridor with your colleagues — and you attempt to destroy everything they think you are working for. I had a

moral commitment to the work I was doing for the British, but even so the strain was almost intolerable. Ames was after only one thing in co-operating with the Rus- sians: money. But he seems to have coped with the pressure outstandingly well. His main worry doesn't seem to have been getting caught, but getting wet in the rain.

He did one or two outstandingly stupid things, like buying that Jaguar. He must have known the first rule for double agents: don't ever attract attention to yourself. Driving that car to work was like a sign say- ing 'I'm guilty!' Even so, that wasn't neces- sarily what led the CIA to suspect him. I don't know what happened, but I believe that information from a source run by the FBI may have been responsible. Or it could have been another KGB defector. The cur- rent head of the KGB has just been fired, which may indicate treachery somewhere in his department.

I don't know exactly how Ames originally came to be involved in spying, but his wife might have been the original contact. She is Bolivian, and I understand she moved in circles thoroughly penetrated by Cuban intelligence. It is possible that she was employed to target him, or to persuade him to spy. I should stress that the idea that Mrs Ames was a latter-day Lady Macbeth is pure speculation on my part, but it could easily have happened — the KGB would have taken over from Cuban intelligence when it was apparent how important the case was.

Ames's treachery could have been detected earlier. In fact, one CIA officer called Gus Hathaway had suspected there 'When did our mad quest for endless sex, drugs and rock and roll become a simple desire for tea and sympathy?' might be a mole inside the CIA as early as 1986. But no one seems to have followed up his concern. Everything seemed to be going so well: the KGB had been hit by several major defections, including mine, and the Western intelligence community knew that the Soviet system was on the verge of collapse. The last thing on any- one's mind was the possibility of Soviet penetration of the CIA. The Cold War was over, we were friends with Gorbachev, so no one cared.

There was also the problem that some of the CIA officers are not all that brilliant. The level is not as scintillatingly high as one might expect. They make up for it by working hard and being thorough, but there are some things you can't make up for that way. The organisation also has the reputation for not being terribly secure. I remember that when I first started working for the British in London I was very eager that they should pass over my information to the Americans. The MI6 officer who was working with me — a very thorough and protective woman — was adamant: `No! Absolutely not! The CIA leaks like a sieve!' At the time, that shocked me. In my naïve way, I thought it amazing that a minor power like Britain should not trust a major one like America. But when I got to America, I found that Americans didn't necessarily trust the CIA either. One FBI agent said to me, 'The CIA? They spy for the other side. We're here to catch them doing it.'

In the KGB, it was virtually impossible to smuggle out documents of any impor- tance. But it seems to have been relatively easy for Ames to take whole bundles of official papers from the CIA Perhaps they'll tighten up on that now, although there is a limit to what can be achieved by internal security procedures, as my own career shows. The fundamental problem was Ames's character. He must have been a totally cynical individual. Cynicism is a quality sometimes too highly prized by intelligence agencies, for it easily degener- ates into total amorality. And that leads to people like Ames, who don't believe in anything except money.

Does Ames's treachery matter? It cer- tainly mattered to the KGB. This week's tit for tat 'discovery' of a British spy — the arrest actually took place over a month ago — shows how angry the KGB is about what it sees as the Americans' hypocritical outrage over the discovery of Ames's spy- ing. The KGB are very proud of him. He neutralised a great deal of my work everything I told the CIA about KGB pen- etration and methods would have gone straight back to Moscow. And though he didn't kill me, he killed those other peo- ple. Gorbachev would have seen reports

prepared on the basis of Ames's informa- tion, and the details of what the CIA was up to — in Eastern Europe and in Russia — would have fuelled the paranoia of men like Vladimir Kryuchkov, the old head of the KGB who organised the coup against Gorbachev partly because he thought Gor- bachev was selling out Russia to foreign interests.

The Ames case has continuing implica- tions. When an ally like France is caught spying on America, as it was last year, everyone knows it's not really important. It's like a small child misbehaving. But Russia has been so thoroughly infected by nearly a century of totalitarianism that it cannot be regarded as an ally. The former Soviet Union is enormously dangerous, at least potentially. The Western powers con- tinue to devote resources to monitoring it, and quite rightly. The Ukraine, for instance, has more nuclear weapons than Britain and France put together. And if Zhirinovsky comes to power in Moscow, the regime will be worse than communism, because it'll be far less stable — a gangster state without any pretensions to anything else. So, though the Cold War is over, the intelligence war continues. We have to know as much as we can about them, and they want to know as much as possible about us. The KGB is as full of paranoid suspicions about the West as ever.