CHAPTER 1
The very worst day of Special Agent Leslie G. “Les” Wiser’s long career in the FBI came on a warm, cloudy Thursday in September 1993.
Wiser, a veteran spy hunter, was on the biggest case of his life. His target was Aldrich Ames, a highly trained CIA officer. The FBI suspected Ames, who went by Rick, of selling some of America’s deepest secrets to Russian spies. Ames, the bureau believed, had told the KGB, the Soviet Union’s notorious spy service, the names of Soviet bloc—communist country—spies secretly working for the United States. Those cold-blooded betrayals led to the executions of at least ten foreign agents who had helped the United States and its allies.
The FBI code-named the Ames investigation NIGHTMOVER.
Wiser’s job was to collect enough evidence against Ames to arrest him. If he succeeded, his bosses would hail him a hero. If he failed, Wiser would go down in FBI lore as the agent who let a killer spy get away. So far, he and his Washington-based team had collected many clues that implicated Ames. But they had yet to collect any hard evidence that Ames was spying for Russia.
That Thursday, the ninth day of September, had started with such great promise. FBI agents on Wiser’s team had intercepted a curious phone call between Ames and his wife, Rosario, who asked him to pick up their young son, Paul, at preschool that day. Ames agreed to, but said he would have to take an early-morning drive beforehand.
“What for?” Rosario asked.
“I have that, uh, errand I have to do,” he said.
“Oh, one of those?”
“Yes,” he said.
Wiser and his team knew something was up. They thought their target might try to make contact with Russia’s new foreign spy service, the SVR. They hoped to catch Ames in the act of placing a note in a secret spot where the Russians could later pick it up. They suspected that Ames used such spots, called dead drops, to avoid being caught. On this day, however, agents hoped they might even catch Ames in a rendezvous with an SVR officer.
Spies with Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, communicated with him through messages like these, which were loaded into dead drops.
The NIGHTMOVER team set up a plan.
Wiser ordered the FBI’s Special Surveillance Group—known as the Gs—to meet near Ames’s home before 6 A.M. that Thursday. He wanted the Gs to tail Ames when he left his expensive home in Arlington, Virginia. They would have to be extremely careful not to let Ames know they were following him. After all, Ames was a professionally trained spy. He would know how surveillance teams worked.
The Gs made an unfortunate mistake that morning. They met in a parking lot near Ames’s house. They were still there just before sunup, when Ames slipped behind the wheel of his shiny red Jaguar XJ6 and drove away. By the time the Gs got organized and reached Ames’s home, their target had already returned from his “errand.” They spotted his Jaguar in the driveway.
Agents checked an FBI video camera hidden on a telephone pole in front of Ames’s house. Their subject had pulled away at 6:03 A.M. and returned twenty minutes later.
Wiser’s team had no clue where Ames had gone.
If this had been a game, the score would have been NIGHTMOVER 1, FBI 0. But this was no game. Human lives and America’s security were at stake.
That afternoon, one of the top officials in the FBI summoned Wiser to his office and chewed him out. It certainly wasn’t Wiser’s fault that the Gs had failed to show up in time to see Ames leave. But the blame landed on his shoulders because he was managing the case. Wiser didn’t explain how the mistake had occurred. But he did say, very politely, that the NIGHTMOVER team still had a chance to catch Ames in the act of spying for the Russians. The day, he said, wasn’t over.
“And then,” as Wiser explained with a laugh years later, “it got worse.”
He ordered the Gs to set up their cars on both sides of a main road outside CIA headquarters. The agency’s massive, highly secure compound overlooked the Potomac River in McLean, Virginia, a short drive from Washington, D.C. Wiser knew Ames planned to leave work that afternoon to take his wife and son to parents’ night at Paul’s preschool. He asked the Gs to put eyes on Ames as he drove home, hoping they might catch him in a rendezvous with one of his Russian spy pals.
A little after 4 P.M., the surveillance team spotted Ames’s Jaguar leaving the CIA compound. They moved into traffic to follow. But the Jaguar, with a top speed of 140 miles per hour, suddenly took off like a frightened cat. The Gs couldn’t follow Ames at such a breakneck speed because he would surely see them giving chase. Making matters worse, the tracking beacon that the FBI had secretly installed in Ames’s Jag seven weeks earlier wasn’t performing well—this was long before the FBI used GPS. Their tracking device, which operated by radio signal, was supposed to help them follow Ames’s car. When the FBI chase car drew close to the Jaguar, the Gs could hear loud beeps. When the target car was farther away, the beeps grew faint. What the Gs now heard from Ames’s car was no beeping at all. He and his Jag were gone.
Wiser heard the frustrating news by FBI radio. But he knew his team had another chance to spot Ames driving home from work. An FBI surveillance plane, one of the bureau’s eyes in the sky, had been scheduled to take off from a nearby airport to track Ames’s movements. But Wiser now heard more bad news. The pilot, for whatever reason, had failed to take off in time to observe the Jaguar. Ames had vanished again.
NIGHTMOVER 2, FBI 0.
“I was pretty frustrated,” Wiser later explained. He and the rest of the NIGHTMOVER team were disappointed. Losing Ames twice in a single day was bad enough, but not knowing where he was going, or what he would do, made them feel worse.
As it happened, Rick Ames had been very, very busy.
Before sunup, he had made his way to Rock Creek Park on the north end of Washington. There, he placed a package for the Russians in a dead drop beneath a footbridge. After work that afternoon, Ames had driven to a wealthy neighborhood near the Russian Embassy. There, he stepped out of his Jaguar and drew a chalk line on a bright U.S. Postal Service mailbox. This mark let the Russians know he had left them a message at the bridge.
Wiser put the Gs on the street again that night to tail Ames. At about 7 P.M., they spotted their target and his family. Rick was at the wheel of the Jag. Rosario sat next to him, and four-year-old Paul was in the back seat. The Gs folded into the traffic behind him, following at a safe distance. They watched as the Jaguar parked at Paul’s preschool in Alexandria, Virginia, and the Ames family walked inside. About an hour later, the Ameses climbed back into their car. Again, the Gs folded themselves into traffic. They expected to follow the family straight to their home.
An FBI surveillance plane, circling above, spotted the Jaguar speeding onto a bridge over the Potomac River. Wiser, listening to his radio, heard a voice crackle to life.
“He’s going into the city!”
Agents tailed Ames into northwest Washington, D.C., and to a tree-lined neighborhood full of stately homes. There, he made an abrupt turn onto a quiet cul-de-sac called Garfield Terrace.
Ames pulled the Jaguar very slowly past a bright blue mailbox. Then he turned the car around and headed home. Agents sensed that Ames was on a mission, but they didn’t know the nature of that mission. Ames, they would later learn, was looking for a signal from his Russian pals.
The directors of the FBI and CIA were not pleased to hear that Wiser’s team had blown two good chances to follow Ames on that miserable Thursday, and their moods didn’t improve just because the Gs managed to tail Ames on the way home from Paul’s school. After all, that trip had not led to any solid evidence.
Wiser was upset by the day’s many disappointments. But he knew it hadn’t been a complete failure. Rick Ames’s movements—getting up much earlier than normal for a short trip in his car, gunning into traffic from the CIA exit road, taking a mysterious after-dark trip into D.C.—all served as clues.
Text copyright © 2020 by Bryan Denson