FBI Files: Catching a Russian Spy: Agent Leslie G. Wiser Jr. and the Case of Aldrich Ames

By Bryan Denson

Catching a Russian Spy is the story of the FBI's investigation of Aldrich Ames, CIA agent who turned Russian spy, and the agent who helped bring him to justice.
Aldrich H. "Rick" Ames was a 31-year veteran of the CIA. He was also a Russian spy. By the time Ames was arrested in 1994, he had betrayed the identities of dozens and caused the deaths of ten agents. The notorious KGB (and later the Russian intelligence service, SVR) paid him millions of dollars.

Agent Leslie G. “Les” Wiser, Jr. ran the FBI's Nightmover investigation tasked with uncovering a mole in the CIA. The team worked night and day to collect evidence—sneaking into Ames' home, hiding a homing beacon in his Jaguar, and installing a video camera above his desk. But the spy kept one step ahead, even after agents followed him to Bogota, Colombia. In a crazy twist, the FBI would score its biggest clue from inside Ames' garbage can.

At the time of his arrest on February 21, 1994, he had compromised more highly-classified CIA assets than any other agent in history.

Go behind the scences of some of the FBI's most interesting cases in award-winning journalist Bryan Denson's FBI Files series, featuring the investigations of the Unabomber, al-Qaeda member Mohamed Mohamud, and Michael Young's diamong theft ring. Each book includes photographs, a glossary, a note from the author, and other detailed backmatter on the subject of the investigation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250199188

Bryan Denson

Bryan Denson is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Spy’s Son. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting, and contributes stories to Newsweek and serves as a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. FBI Files is Bryan’s first series for young readers. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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FBI Files: Catching a Russian Spy: Agent Les Wiser Jr. and the Case of Aldrich Ames by Bryan Denson

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Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

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To Kristin … my person, my love, my gift from the universe

We should begin by recognizing that spying is a fact of life … and we need to deal severely with those who betray our country.

—President Ronald Reagan

Why did this betrayal come so easily to me? I just don’t know. Let me think.

–Aldrich H. Rick Ames

KEY CHARACTERS

The Suspects

Aldrich Hazen Rick Ames served three decades in the CIA, including a stretch of nearly nine years as a KGB mole.

Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy Ames, a native of Colombia, was Ames’s wife and mother of their son, Paul. She goes by Rosario.

The Soviets and Russians

Sergei Chuvakhin, an arms-control expert, was a Soviet diplomat.

Victor Cherkashin, a KGB officer, headed counterspy operations at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C.

Yuri Karetkin, an SVR officer known to Rick Ames as Andre, served as his handler in Colombia.

The FBI Team

Special Agent in Charge Robert M. Bear Bryant headed the FBI’s Washington Metropolitan Field Office.

Supervisory Special Agent Leslie G. Wiser Jr. managed the FBI investigation of Aldrich Ames.

Special Agent Marvin O’Dell Dell Spry served as case agent.

Special Agents Jim Holt and Jim Milburn, known inside the FBI as Jim Squared, were experts on the foreign spy operations of the KGB (and later the SVR).

The CIA Team

Paul J. Redmond, a senior counterintelligence chief, supervised the team that identified Aldrich Ames as the deadliest mole in CIA history.

Jeanne Vertefeuille, a CIA officer from 1954 to 1992, led an internal task force that investigated the cases of CIA assets betrayed by Ames.

Sandy Grimes, a twenty-six-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service, joined Vertefeuille in the investigation that ultimately identified Ames as a Russian mole.

Daniel E. Payne was a CIA officer who investigated Ames’s finances and bank accounts.

PROLOGUE

Take a close look at the badge on this page.

The shield is gold plated, stands two and a half inches tall, and comes with a solemn pledge. The FBI agents who carry these badges promise to defend the Constitution. They promise to protect Americans from all enemies. They promise to protect us no matter who our attackers might be, and where they might strike.

Fourteen thousand special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, backed by 21,000 support personnel, carry those badges. They work night and day in every state, territory, and corner of the world. They live by the FBI motto: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.

In the early days of the organization, America’s worst threats were at home. In the 1930s, gun-toting gangsters with names like Al Scarface Capone, Charles Pretty Boy Floyd, and George Machine Gun Kelly Barnes got rich robbing banks, kidnapping children for ransom, and operating illegal bars and casinos. The FBI declared war on these public enemies and succeeded in taking many off the streets. But in the last half of the twentieth century, Americans faced new and greater dangers in the homeland.

Highly organized street gangs, the mafia, outlaw bikers, and domestic terrorists became targets of the bureau. The most dangerous were white-supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. From the civil rights era into the 1980s, those secretive groups terrorized and sometimes killed people of color with fists, firearms, and explosives—and still do even today. By the late 1990s, the FBI declared America’s leading domestic terrorist threat to be underground groups such as the Earth Liberation Front, which firebombed businesses and government agencies it accused of harming the natural world.

Then, in a single morning, the FBI’s mission changed forever.

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists boarded four jetliners on the East Coast. Once in the air, they seized control of the planes. In eighty-one minutes, they flew them into the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia, and, thanks to intervening passengers, a field in Pennsylvania. Those men, on a suicide mission, murdered nearly three thousand innocent people. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history—a foreign assault on American soil.

The attacks of 9/11 changed the FBI overnight. Agents still catch bank robbers, kidnappers, and other criminals, but their primary mission today is to protect Americans from terrorists, spies, organized crime, public corruption, cyberattacks, and assaults on our economic, military, and political systems.

Books in the FBI Files series spotlight the FBI’s most amazing cases since the bureau began on July 26, 1908. You will meet some of America’s worst villains and the heroic men and women who brought them to justice. And you will understand why FBI agents live by the motto Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.

INTRODUCTION

COLD WAR, SPY WAR

The United States and the Soviet Union waged war from 1947 to 1991.

This was no ordinary war. The two superpowers fired few shots. But both countries were armed with tens of thousands of nuclear missiles, and they were poised to launch them at each other. This would have meant World War III, millions of deaths, a global catastrophe. Relations between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were so icy that this conflict came to be called the Cold War.

Why did this start?

The two nations had very different beliefs about how to succeed in a growing world. The United States, based on representative democracy, gave people freedom to own land and build their own businesses. The government of the Soviet Union, based on communism, owned the land and put its people to work in government jobs.

Each superpower promoted its system around the world. They backed each other’s enemies in bloody wars across the globe. The USSR, for instance, supported America’s communist enemies in the Vietnam War. The United States backed Afghanistan in its war with the Soviet Union. The object for both was global domination.

A secret, unseen part of the Cold War played out in the shadows. These secret battles were fought by professional spies. Their goals were to learn their enemy’s military, economic, and policy secrets and use them to destroy the other side.

The main U.S. spy service was the Central Intelligence Agency, better known as the CIA. The Soviet Union’s primary spy organization, the KGB (Committee for State Security), branded the CIA its main enemy. Both agencies worked night and day to recruit people to betray their countries’ secrets. They were particularly interested in getting rival spies—intelligence officers—to switch sides and give away their own nations’ deepest secrets. The CIA recruited Soviets, the KGB recruited Americans. Both betrayed their own countries, usually for money. It was a serious game of cat and mouse.

One of the Soviet Union’s greatest victories in this unseen war came by luck: CIA officer Aldrich Hazen Rick Ames volunteered to spy for the KGB inside his own agency. He spoke Russian, knew the KGB extremely well, and had access to the names of Soviet spies risking their lives to secretly work for the United States. And Ames betrayed them all.

The Cold War officially ended at Christmastime 1991. The Soviet Union disbanded, leaving in its place America’s new rival, the Russian Federation. Russia’s new foreign spy service, replacing the KGB, was the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service. Even though the Cold War was