FBI Files: Catching a Russian Spy: Agent Leslie G. Wiser Jr. and the Case of Aldrich Ames
By Bryan Denson
4/5
()
About this ebook
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.
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.
Related to FBI Files
Titles in the series (2)
FBI Files: The Unabomber: Agent Kathy Puckett and the Hunt for a Serial Bomber Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFBI Files: Catching a Russian Spy: Agent Leslie G. Wiser Jr. and the Case of Aldrich Ames Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related ebooks
The Spy Within: Larry Chin and China's Penetration of the CIA Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hunting the President: Threats, Plots and Assassination Attempts--From FDR to Obama Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Intrepid's Last Case Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Operation Solo: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel and Francis Gary Powers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories, and the Hunt for Putin's Spies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Double Agent: The First Hero of World War II and How the FBI Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy Ring Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Agent Sniper: The Cold War Superagent and the Ruthless Head of the CIA Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSpy Dust: Two Masters of Disguise Reveal the Tools and Operations that Helped Win the Cold War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Guardian: Life in the Crosshairs of the CIA's War on Terror Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Billion Dollar Spy: by David E. Hoffman | Summary & Analysis: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBreaking Cover: My Secret Life in the CIA and What It Taught Me about What's Worth Fighting For Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wallenberg: The Incredible True Story of the Man Who Saved the Jews of Budapest Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wrong Jew: Defeating Those Who Want Us Dead Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWe Got Him!: A Memoir of the Hunt and Capture of Saddam Hussein Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Operation Valuable Fiend: The CIA's First Paramilitary Strike Against the Iron Curtain Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCold War Counterfeit Spies: Tales of Espionage; Genuine or Bogus? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsM: MI5's First Spymaster Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Atom Spies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSix Minutes To Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Spy in Plain Sight: The Inside Story of the FBI and Robert Hanssen—America's Most Damaging Russian Spy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Treason Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Children's For You
Dork Diaries 1: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pete the Kitty Goes to the Doctor Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cedric The Shark Get's Toothache: Bedtime Stories For Children, #1 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little House on the Prairie Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Secret Garden: The 100th Anniversary Edition with Tasha Tudor Art and Bonus Materials Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Crossover: A Newbery Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Into the Wild: Warriors #1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Summary of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCoraline Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Number the Stars: A Newbery Award Winner Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5House of Many Ways Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Alice In Wonderland: The Original 1865 Unabridged and Complete Edition (Lewis Carroll Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCoraline 10th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The School for Good and Evil: Now a Netflix Originals Movie Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Phantom Tollbooth Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Long Walk to Water: Based on a True Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Island of the Blue Dolphins: A Newbery Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Atlas Shrugged SparkNotes Literature Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmari and the Night Brothers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dark Is Rising Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tikki Tikki Tembo Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How To Write A Children’s Book Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bridge to Terabithia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Graveyard Book Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Alone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Presents a Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My Shadow Is Purple Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Out of My Heart Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for FBI Files
1 rating0 reviews
Book preview
FBI Files - Bryan Denson
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Roaring Brook Press ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
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