Anybody in Charge There? : CIA bungling of the Aldrich Ames spy case still is hard to fathom

A Congress that in the last few years made some deep cuts in the nation’s intelligence budget may be tempted to cut deeper still during the coming budget battle, with the Central Intelligence Agency being a special target because of simmering congressional ire over the Aldrich Ames spy case. The anger is understandable; for now it remains inexplicable if not inexcusable that someone like Ames could have gone undetected for so long as he allegedly pursued a highly lucrative spying career on behalf of Moscow.

But while Congress is right to demand a full and verifiable accounting from the CIA about its monumental internal security failures, and right to insist on much tighter procedures for monitoring employees of the intelligence services, enacting an indiscriminately punitive cut in intelligence spending is not the way to go. The case for maintaining a strong intelligence gathering capability--and an alert and effective counterintelligence arm--seems self-evident. What has to be drastically altered, certainly in the CIA, is the mind-boggling bureaucratic ineptitude that allowed betrayal to go on for so long, and so visibly.

Ames, says the government, collected more than $2.5 million from Moscow for the secrets he allegedly began selling in 1985. He was not a bit shy about spending it ostentatiously, during a period when one major CIA operation after another in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was going bad. Yet it seems to have taken five or six years before the CIA, at last working cooperatively with the FBI, drew any connections between Ames’ grand and even showy lifestyle (on a $70,000 salary) and the near-certain knowledge that the CIA had been penetrated. The overwhelming question is why it took so long.

It’s clear that Congress doesn’t intend to leave it up to the CIA to clean its house unaided; look for legislation to tighten up monitoring of the intelligence services. It’s also clear, if the government’s allegations are correct, that Moscow’s ace mole provided information easily worth the astonishingly high payments he received. The terrible thing is not just that he was so successful, but that the CIA made it so easy for him.