In 1995, it was revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had delivered intelligence reports to the U.S. government between 1986 and 1994 which were based on agent reporting from confirmed or suspected Soviet operatives. From 1985 to his arrest in February 1994, CIA officer and KGB mole Aldrich Ames compromised Agency sources and operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, leading to the arrest of many CIA agents and the execution of at least ten of them. This allowed the KGB to replace the CIA agents with its own operatives or to force them to cooperate, and the double agents then funneled a mixture of disinformation and true material to U.S. intelligence. Although the CIA's Soviet-East European (SE) and Central Eurasian divisions knew or suspected the sources to be Soviet double agents, they nevertheless disseminated this "feed" material within the government. Some of these intelligence reports even reached Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, as well as President-elect Bill Clinton.
The disclosure of the deception in 1995, following investigations into the Ames case, led to a media stir and heavy congressional criticism. The Agency's Inspector General, Frederick Hitz, identified 12 CIA personnel he deemed responsible for the lapse, including three former directors; CIA Director John M. Deutch criticized seven of these employees, calling the affair "a major intelligence failure". A damage assessment determined that the disinformation altered intelligence analyses of the Soviet (and later Russian) military towards the end of the Cold War, creating a false impression of Soviet strength; however, initial charges that the faulty reports led to billions of dollars' worth of Pentagon spending proved to be exaggerated. Regardless, the revelation further undermined the CIA's credibility in the wake of the Ames case.
Background
Aldrich Ames, a CIA counterintelligence agent working in the SE Division, approached the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., on April 16, 1985, and within a month received $50,000 from the KGB in exchange for espionage service. Meeting with Soviet official and go-between Sergey Dmitriyevich Chuvakhin on June 13, Ames passed him copied documents identifying over ten Soviet agents working for the CIA and FBI. As a CIA review related, the Soviets began arresting and sometimes executing U.S. operatives later in 1985, and the CIA realized that it "was faced with a major CI problem." Suspicions initially fell on Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA officer who also compromised CIA operations in 1985 and defected to the Soviet Union on September 21. However, the CIA realized by fall 1985 that Howard was not responsible for all of the damage. Three agents arrested in fall 1985 and later executed, some of the CIA's most valuable sources, had been betrayed by Ames, not Howard. By December, six SE agents had vanished, a trend which continued into 1986; according to a congressional report, the over 20 operations Ames revealed "amounted to a virtual collapse of the CIA's Soviet operations." Ames, who stated that he spied for the KGB due to his financial debt, gave thousands of pages of classified documents to the Soviets and later admitted to disclosing over 100 CIA, FBI, military, and allied operations; he was deemed responsible for the arrests and executions of ten U.S. sources.
Moreover, by compromising CIA methods, Ames enabled the KGB and its successor, the SVR, to filter feed material to the CIA from 1986 to 1993. In 1987, KGB agent Aleksandr Zhomov offered to sell the CIA intelligence on how the Soviets had detected and arrested the CIA's agents. The SE Division accepted Zhomov and assigned him the cryptonym GTPROLOGUE. Zhomov, who was actually a Soviet double agent assigned to protect Ames, furnished fake documents ascribing the CIA's agent losses to superior KGB surveillance and luck. He then told the CIA that he would identify upcoming KGB plants, but only on the condition that the CIA treat them as genuine, lest the KGB discover the leak and arrest him. The fake agents soon overwhelmed Moscow Station's resources, and Zhomov disappeared in July 1990 after receiving payment from the U.S. The spurious sources and the disinformation they provided reportedly convinced the CIA that the 1985–1986 debacle was an anomaly, thus protecting Ames. Other genuine CIA agents were compromised by the Soviets, who used them to feed false intelligence back to the U.S.
The CIA began to investigate the disappearances of its agents, initially suspecting that bad tradecraft, a Soviet breach of Moscow Station or the CIA's communications, or a mole was responsible for the disaster. Suspicions fell on spy dust (METKA), a KGB compromise of CIA cables, or new Soviet surveillance tactics, but these probes proved unsuccessful. Ames' conspicuous spending drew the attention of the molehunters in late 1989, but he passed a polygraph test. However, the molehunt regained momentum in 1991 as it received more officers to work on the case. Attention focused on Ames and other suspects, and his finances were investigated once more in 1992; in August, the investigators linked Ames' bank deposits with his meetings with the Soviets. In March 1993, the molehunter unit concluded that there was a KGB mole within the CIA who had followed Howard, and the FBI began close surveillance of Ames, monitoring his office and home, and tracking his car. A June 25 search of his office found about 144 classified documents unrelated to his work; an analysis of his finances found an unexplained $1,326,310; and subsequent searches of Ames' trash and residence found further documents on CIA operations and agents, as well as Ames' own espionage for the KGB. On February 21, 1994, Ames and his wife, Rosario, were arrested by FBI agents: The duo pled guilty to espionage, and the Senate Intelligence Committee requested that the CIA's Inspector General review the case.
Initial revelation On October 31, 1995, CIA Director John M. Deutch presented two investigations into Ames' espionage to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees: the damage assessment conducted by Executive Director of Intelligence Community Affairs Richard L. Haver, and CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz's report. The reports indicated that in the 1980s and 1990s, as a result of Ames' betrayal, the CIA had given presidents and other senior officials intelligence derived from Soviet double agents. Hitz also recommended reprimands for nearly 12 serving and former CIA officers, including several deputy directors for operations and former directors William H. Webster, Robert M. Gates, and R. James Woolsey Jr., "for not closely supervising sensitive information sent to the president." Hitz's report also claimed that CIA officers in the Directorate of Operations (DO) distributed sensitive intelligence reports despite suspecting that their sources were Soviet-controlled. However, some CIA officials reportedly disputed this, saying that the dubious sources were properly identified.
The same day, Deutch publicly criticized six former, and one serving, CIA officers for the "devastating" intelligence failure, although he did not hold three of his predecessors accountable. He stated that would create an independent, National Intelligence Council-managed Customer Review Process for agent reporting, and said that he had already installed new management, stressed counterintelligence at the CIA, and established new accountability boards, among other reforms. Deutch added that if the 12 CIA officers cited in Hitz's report were still employed, he would have fired two of them. He said that he had reprimanded the only officer still at the Agency, that the two officers he would have fired were "banned from future employment with the Agency," and that four others had been reprimanded or warned. Deutch insisted that efforts to improve counterintelligence would prevent a recurrence of the Ames "catastrophe," and provided the FBI with the damage assessment report so the Bureau could assist in subsequent investigations.
The CIA's 1995 damage assessment report singled out former SE Division reports chief Robert Lubbehusen for sending reports without disclosing that they were from double agents, despite Agency rules requiring warnings on such reports. He and other mid-level officers allegedly saw the controlled-agent reporting as genuine and feared that revealing the reports' sources would distract officials from the supposedly valuable intelligence. He may have also been swayed by pressure from the Defense Department for more intelligence. According to reporter James Risen, reports officers were sometimes more knowledgeable about CIA sources than case officers, and were "often the first to see the raw intelligence and thus had the opportunity to describe the sources in the reports." Following approval by the SE Division's chief, CIA intelligence analysts would then view the reports, but had to rely on the reports officers to describe the sources. However, one anonymous source backed Lubbehusen, saying that some of the intelligence may have been genuine material sent by the Soviets to bolster their moles' bona fides. Even after Lubbehusen was removed, his successors continued to leave out disclosures on reports, although Lubbehusen's reprimand was reputedly the strongest of the seven Deutch issued.
Congressional and Pentagon investigations Congressional committee members stated that the blend of genuine information and disinformation altered American perceptions of the USSR and possibly affected billions of dollars' worth of military acquisition decisions. Congress pointed to the multibillion-dollar F-22 fighter project as a possible result of inflated estimates on the USSR. Committee members charged that the CIA never warned the recipients of the suspicious intelligence because it sought to protect dubious sources; they cited a case in which a CIA officer forwarded 16 reports without mentioning that they were derived from a confirmed Soviet agent. In another case, questioned sources provided documents on a new Soviet anti-aircraft missile indicating it had a new capability, prompting costly American spending on aircraft radar. Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the revelation "mind-boggling" and sought a hearing with Webster, Gates, and Woolsey. However, Representative Larry Combest (R-Tex.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, stressed that "nothing has been proven" and that the intelligence may not have been wholly spurious. Intelligence officials countered that Specter's claims of the reports' damage were exaggerated, saying that development and acquisition decisions would never be based solely on agent reporting.