FBI Takes Heat for Not Catching Spy Earlier

WASHINGTON (April 21, 1997 4:02 p.m. EDT) - A Justice Department report released Monday sharply criticized the FBI for failing to pursue leads that likely would have led to the earlier uncovering of CIA officer Aldrich Ames as a spy for Moscow.

The report said proper attention by top FBI management to the intelligence losses suffered by the United States in the mid-1980s and better communication within the FBI "would have likely led to an earlier discovery of Ames, thus cutting short his career of espionage."

Ames, a former CIA officer, was arrested in February 1994. He later pleaded guilty to spying for Moscow since 1985 in what federal prosecutors have called one of the worst and most damaging espionage cases in U.S. history.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich recently completed a 400-page, top-secret report on the FBI's handling of the Ames case. A 15-page, unclassified summary was released Monday.

"Our review revealed that throughout nearly the entire nine-year period of Ames' espionage, FBI management devoted inadequate attention to determining the cause of the sudden, unprecedented and catastrophic losses suffered by both the FBI and the CIA in their Soviet intelligence programs," he said.

Ames passed information to the KGB that led to the compromise and execution of at least 10 people who acted as spies for the FBI and CIA. The losses of the spies started in 1985-86.

"If the FBI and the CIA had initiated a joint investigation of these losses in 1987 or 1988, there is reason to believe that Ames would have emerged as a mole suspect," Bromwich said.

"FBI's senior management was almost entirely unaware of the scope and significance of the mid-1980s losses and of the FBI's limited efforts to determine their cause," he said.

Bromwich said the FBI never showed any sustained interest before 1991 to investigating the CIA's losses, and a joint CIA-FBI effort starting in mid-1991 suffered from "inadequate management attention as well as insufficient resources."

Once espionage emerged as the leading theory for explaining the losses of the U.S. spies, the FBI should have aggressively investigated, he said, adding: "Here, the FBI ignorned the obvious disaster at the CIA."

In August 1992, a CIA-FBI team had collected compelling circumstantial evidence implicating Ames, but failed to recommend that the FBI open a criminal investigation," he said.

The FBI waited until after the teamn's final report had been issued in March 1993 before opening the investigation, Bromwich said.

As part of the review, Bromwich's team interviewed Ames, who is serving a sentence of life in prison, reviewed more than 26,000 pages of documents and conducted more than 100 interviews.

The FBI said in a statement it has "strongly taken issue with many aspects of the report." The FBI admitted strained ties with the CIA in the 1980s, but said changes in 1993 fixed the problem, with the relationship now "at its historic best."

-- By JAMES VICINI, Reuter