Within hours of the arrest of CIA officer Aldrich Ames for espionage, unnamed agency officials were telling reporters that Ames was a drunk and a mediocre case officer. In the weeks that followed, former superiors and fellow officers described him as inept, dull, unsophisticated and lackadaisical. The comments were not surprising. Agency employees wanted to distance themselves from the alleged traitor in their midst, and so were quick to point out that Ames was neither well regarded nor typical of the caliber of personnel within the CIA component that handled clandestine human intelligence activity, the Directorate of Operations.
What was typical, however, was the nonchalance with which an officer of Ames' low caliber was allowed to proceed from job to job within the operations directorate, without anyone in a managerial position seeming to focus on the fact that the organization had a problem on its hands. As the agency's inspector general subsequently noted, Ames was "not going anywhere and no one cared."
Nevertheless, CIA comments at the time of Ames' arrest are revealing. After all, the officer whom the anonymous agency sources were trashing (and had been judged by the CIA at one point to be the third-worst officer among two hundred at his rank) had been only a few years before entrusted with one of the most sensitive posts within the intelligence community--chief of the counterintelligence branch of the Soviet-East European division of the operations directorate. The damage he could and did do to U.S. and allied intelligence operations in the Soviet Union was immense. That the agency was willing to give Ames this position says as much about how important the CIA considers counterintelligence as any stack of pronouncements to the contrary from a succession of directors of central intelligence.
