Vladimir Kryuchkov (1924–2007) is best known for the failed August 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. He oversaw two of America’s worst Cold War intelligence breaches, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. Kryuchkov took measures to deflect attention from both double-agents during CIA/FBI mole hunts. His success at deceiving CIA allowed both moles to operate for longer than they probably should have.
Aldrich Hazen Ames
Ames (b. 26 May 1941) was a drunkard and mediocrity. His CIA career, therefore, advanced. He was invited to join Club CIA because his father, Carleton, had been a member—albeit a wretched spy who failed in his assignment to Burma and received a stinging evaluation and probation. Aldrich survived “the Farm” (CIA training center, Camp Peary, Virginia) despite receiving a psychological evaluation determining that he didn’t have the “right stuff” to be a case officer. Ames failed to recruit a single agent during his entire CIA career (1967-1994).
Ames had liquid lunches and slept them off in his office. His CIA “running buddies” were fellow alcoholics and ne’er-do-wells; he spent over an hour every day in the main building’s courtyard—the designated smoking area—smoking, gossiping, and lazing. Ames received devastating performance evaluations, including one that stressed his atrocious hygiene, rotting teeth, and unclean attire. He ranked at the bottom quarter of his Camp Peary cohort.
CIA did not terminate him. Ames was shunted from desk to desk with increased responsibility. Ames became the head of counter-intelligence for the Soviet Division, with access to operational records, names of CIA case officers, and names of Soviets who spied for CIA. He caused immense damage since he first began spying for the KGB in 1985. CIA operatives were arrested and executed by KGB.
Robert Philip Hanssen
Hanssen (b. 18 April 18 1944; d. 5 June 2023), joined the FBI in 1976 and spied for GRU from 1979 to 1981; and for KGB from 1985 to 2001 (his arrest).
Hanssen took risks, but unlike Ames, wrapped himself in the veneer of political conservatism, Roman Catholicism, and family; and displayed a diligent work ethic. His betrayals caused considerable harm to U.S. National Security, including the losses of agents inside the USSR. One of his betrayals was Dimitri Polyakov (codenamed “Tophat”), a Major-General in GRU, who spied for the FBI. Ames also betrayed Polyakov, which confirmed Hanssen’s information.
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov
He was not a “spymaster” of the same caliber as East Germany’s Marcus Wolf, about whom I wrote last year. Kryuchkov was an apparatchik who rose within the KGB, led its First Chief Directorate (FCD)—the division responsible for foreign intelligence—for thirteen years, before becoming the KGB’s last chairman (1988–91). Kryuchkov was astute, knowing that people betrayed their country for one (or more) of three reasons: ideology, money, or because they had been entrapped (blackmail, honeytrap, etc.) by a foreign intelligence service. Ames and Hanssen were in it for the money. In 1982, Kryuchkov opened KGB’s coffers to facilitate recruitment. Ames and Hanssen, both recruited during Kryuchkov’s tenure at FCD, were delighted by the payoffs.
Kryuchkov’s actions to protect Ames and Hanssen from being identified as moles are central to this story. Betrayals by Ames and Hanssen led to the losses of CIA assets, most of whom (we know or we suspect) were executed. But as CIA kept losing assets, it became clear to even the densest at Langley that CIA may have a mole (or moles). However, to avoid focusing their investigations on personnel, CIA locked onto the idea (or excuse) of leaks in its secure communications systems, viz., cracking of CIA’s encryption by the Soviets. Kryuchkov took several measures to encourage CIA to chase this rabbit.
Arnold Bracy and Clayton Lonetree, two U.S. Marine Corps guards at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, became Kryuchkov’s means for selling the communications (“comms”) leaks idea to CIA. In March 1987, following their arrest and interrogations by the Naval Investigative Service (NIS; precursor to NCIS) for suspicion of spying for KGB, Bracy admitted, under great pressure, to allowing Soviet agents into the Embassy’s communications unit. Although Bracy immediately recanted, Jack Downing, chief of Moscow Station, was convinced that KGB had run amok in the comms unit, and possibly planted bugs in the embassy (none were found). Milt Bearden, deputy chief of the Soviet division, said of the Bracy-Lonetree affair, that “[e]verything that had been compromised was in a limited but retrievable way shared with the Moscow station. So that was that. Case closed.” CIA settled on comms leaks as the source of its security leaks.
KGB, on learning of the Bracy-Lonetree investigation by NIS and CIA, took full advantage. Through a multitude of sources that communicated with CIA, the KGB fed it with “confirmations” of the roles of Bracy, Lonetree, and Edward Lee Howard (CIA officer who defected to the USSR in 1985) in the losses of CIA’s Soviet agents. KGB back channel communications to CIA noted other factors that contributed to the demise of CIA assets: “sloppy” tradecraft by CIA case officers, blunders by double agents, etc. KGB tailored their disinformation to comport with an assessment by John Stein, Deputy Director for Operations, which thus served as “confirmation bias.”
A KGB officer, pretending to defect, fed a story that the CIA’s communications and signals intelligence center in Warrenton, VA, was compromised. Ninety employees of the Warrenton facility were placed under investigation. The Soviet “defector” disappeared. It took CIA five years to realize the KGB had bamboozled them.
Kryuchkov’s talent lay in shrewdly analyzing his enemy’s weaknesses, viz., refusal by CIA to accept the existence of moles; and CIA’s insistence on focusing on comms leaks, wiretaps, etc., and then running a series of deception operations against his adversaries.
Readings and Comments
On Ames, see Tim Weiner, et al., Betrayal, NY: Random House, 1995. On Hanssen, see David Wise, Spy, NY: Random House, 2002.
Vitaly Cherashkin, the KGB officer who “handled” Ames and Hanssen, offers a contrasting portrait of Ames, to wit, that Ames was not a mediocrity. See V. Cherashkin, Spy Handler (NY: Perseus, 2005). It suits CIA to malign Ames’s character; whereas it suits KGB to burnish it: for CIA, he was the “useless spy” that betrayed USA; for KGB, the “clever spy” that served USSR.
Ames was a lousy spy. An insular and mediocre Agency failed to vet Ames’s finances frequently, as is required by law for the maintenance of TS/SCI security clearance; and repeatedly failed to fire him for incompetence. Ames was able to betray the United States for almost a decade because the Agency “refused to believe it harbored a traitor.” In accordance with established CIA customs and practices, the Agency “surrounded the disaster in a shield of secrecy” to protect itself. Only in 1991 did CIA reluctantly refer the case to the FBI.
The hunt for a mole in the Soviet division or among the Agency’s counterintelligence staff would not have been arduous. Ames openly spent the $1.5 million he received from KGB. A stroll through the parking lot at Langley will have revealed his $49,000, 1989 white Jaguar, which he traded up in 1992 for a red Jaguar; and a drive past his home at 2512 N. Randolph Street Arlington, VA 22207, which he purchased in 1989 for $540,000 in cash, would have triggered financial and security investigations. However, the Agency, which has no compunctions about violating the civil liberties of U.S. citizens or harassing CIA case officers who voice disagreement with “company policies,” had inviolable red lines about investigating Club members.
Perspectives 
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