Finding Spies: Ames and Hanssen

Abstract

T he cold war was waged not only in the third world and on missile production lines, but also in quieter ways. During the waning months of 1985, American spies in the USSR were being arrested at an alarming rate, and by the following spring almost a dozen – virtually the entire roster of human sources operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the Soviet Union – had been killed. Most were quickly executed; in some cases their fate was never determined. As time passed, a number of technical operations being conducted against the Soviets were also exposed. Obviously, something was terribly wrong. In 1986, the CIA and FBI launched separate counterintelligence investigations to try to determine what had happened, so that corrective measures could be taken. The CIA's approach was to look at the records of the blown cases to see if there were common elements that might provide leads. Initially the hypotheses were: (1) that the problem was sloppy tradecraft by the Soviet agents; (2) revelations from the numerous spies arrested in 1985 (which had become known as “the year of the spy”); or (3) that U.S. secure communications with Moscow had been compromised. It soon became clear that none of these hypotheses was a plausible explanation. That all of the American spies had made operational mistakes at the same time was unlikely.