[Dell]: It was 1985 that everything began to go bad.
We had two of our sources that were compromised
by someone unknown..
[Sandy]: He was a general.
You can't get any higher than that.
He was the most important spy we'd ever had.
He was executed.
We were all in tears.
- And how do you put a value on a human life?
- There's a handful of people that would have had access
to the cases that were compromised.
- We knew it was somebody we were working with.
- We had his telephone tapped at home and at work.
- There was no way that we were going to fail.
- More would have been killed.
[Dell]: The last thing you want to believe is that you've got
an American citizen who's betraying his country.
[Cindy]: A mole. [Dell]: A mole inside the CIA.
[narrator]: In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
Drug busts, mob stings.
Terrorist takedowns.
[people shouting] We understand why people
want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it. - Freeze!
- FBI.
- FBI! [man in the distance]: Action!
[narrator]: But they don't know the half of it.
What really goes down? We save that for each other,
when we're talking agent to agent.
This is FBI. True.
- Sandy, in the mid eighties,
What was your role in the Agency?
- I worked in the Soviet group on the GRU officers
and the KGB officers.
[narrator]: Sandy Grimes joined the CIA in 1967
and worked with double agents who were spying on behalf of the U.S. Government
- I was in charge of all of our operations in Africa.
It was a wonderful place to recruit Soviet and East Europeans.
- I knew you were cool.
I didn't know you were that cool.
[narrator]: Barry Colvert was on the FBI's fugitive robbery
task force before becoming
a polygrapher in 1980, working murder cases, terrorism,
white-collar crime and espionage.
- So, Dell, tell me about the start of your FBI career.
- I seemed to have a knack for counterintelligence work,
looking for people who were spying against the U.S. Government
[narrator]: Dell Spry was a deputy sheriff in Alabama,
before joining the bureau.
He worked white-collar crime and counterespionage,
and was the FBI's liaison
to the CIA counterintelligence center.
- What started the case?
Are you guys working together?
How did you know there was a mole inside the CIA?
[narrator]: Cindy Coppola is a 23-year veteran of the FB.
she worked on cases that included organized crime
and terrorism and took part in multinational investigations
into drug trafficking and money laundering.
- It was 1985 that everything began to go bad.
- Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
[acclamations]
[journalist]: Tensions between the U.S. and Soviet union reach
a fever pitch as both sides deploy missiles in Europe.
- We had people starting to get recalled.
[narrator]: In 1985, some of America's most valuable intelligence assets,
Soviets secretly working with the U.S Government,
are suddenly called back to Russia
and never heard from again.
[Dell]: We had two of our sources Martynov-- [Sandy]: Yes.
[Dell]: And Motorin, they were FBI sources
that were compromised by that time someone unknown.
[narrator]: A year later, the CIA loses contact with major
General Dimitri Polyakov, a priceless source in the GRU,
the Soviet intelligence directorate.
- He was a general in the GRU.
You can't get any higher than that .
He was the most important spy we'd ever had.
And he really wanted to help the United States.
He thought we just didn't have any understanding
of the GRU and, of course, the KGB too.
- He was an incredible asset for this country.
Just unbelievably important.
And Sandy probably won't say it, but I will.
That's one of the reasons she was chosen
to be assigned to work Polyakov.
She was responsible in large part, analyzing
his information, providing taskings for him.
All of that happened because of Sandy Grimes.
- When we heard that Polyakov had been arrested,
we were all in tears.
[narrator]: The Soviet secret police are worried Polyakov
will swallow cyanide to kill himself
and avoid torture in prison,
so they put him in a choke hol.
[suspenseful music]
[Sandy]: This sounds a little odd.
He was a nice guy.
He was our hero.
[riveting music] He was executed.
- Besides Polyakov, there was others that were missing as well.
So, Dell, tell me about Tolkachev.
- Tolkachev was an engineer and knew a great deal
about weapons and how weapons were designed and developed.
So he was a real significant source for us about what was
Russia looking to in the future as weapons development.
- So did he disappear as well?
- Yes, he was one of the ones who disappeared post 1985.
[narrator]: The arrests and executions can't be coincidental.
Investigators from the FBI and CIA
suspect there's a traitor inside the Agency.
[Dell]: The last thing you want to believe is that you've got
an American citizen who's betraying his country
and that it is someone that you sit next to at the office.
- A mole.
- What was the impetus that
brought you two together working and then Barry
coming in later on?
- I was told by my supervisor that headquarters wanted to talk
to me and I went to headquarters.
And I was told we had this special matter
coming over from the Agency.
He said: "we want you to be the lead investigator on this matter".
And I said: "Great, what matter?"
And he said: "Well, we can't tell you yet.
You got to get read in and compartmented."
And that's when I became a member of the task force.
[narrator]: The CIA is already hunting for the mole.
but as a foreign intelligence agency, they can't investigate Americans on U.S. soil.
That's the job of the FBI.
- So you all are working together to find
a potential mole within the Agency.
Take me through those steps. - We would go over to meet
in their counterintelligence center with Jeanne and Dan Payne
and Sandy, we'd come over to the Washington field office
and we would all get together in the SCIF.
- Sure, I worked in them all the time.
- You've been in them so you know all about them.
If you could just imagine, Cindy, the pressure of being
in this small room and I mean literally 10 hours a day at least.
And you can't, when you leave that room,
you can't talk to anybody about what you're doing.
The pressure was just...it was enormous.
It was extremely difficult on me and my wife
because I was working crazy hours, and I get a phone call
in the middle of the night, I'd have to get up and leave.
- Your weekends are never yours.
- And we also knew personally there was no way
that we were going to fail.
Professionally, there was no way we could fail.
More people would die.
You know, every day was another gamble.
We're looking for someone now who would sell out his country.
And we got. And I think Jeanne was the one that said:
"okay, guys, everybody, let's write down
our top three suspects".
- We knew it was somebody we were working with.
- When Jeanne took up the cards, Rick was one of the top three
on every card - And who was that?
- Rick Ames. - Rick Ames.
Aldrich Ames. - Aldrich Ames.
[narrator]: To America's spy masters, this couldn't be a worse name.
Aldrich Ames has access to the country's most vital secrets.
Ames is a counterintelligence officer in the CIA's Soviet and Eastern European Division,
where he's privy to the Agencys plans and operations
against the KBG and GRU.
- Rick and I carpooled.
- Are you kidding?
So tell me about that.
You lived near him and you carpooled with him.
What was he like? - Tall, gangly.
He always forgot to wash his hair, comb it.
And he was late every single time.
He was just goofy old Rick.
Thought he was the smartest kid on the block.
- We thought there were others that needed to be looked at,
but we agreed that Ames was clearly the person to focus--
- Your number one choice. [Dell]: Yes.
We want to focus our resources on.
[narrator]: As the CIA's assets are being swept up in the USSR...
Ames marries his second wife, Rosario, and he suddenly
has money to spend, buying luxury items, including
a new $43,000-dollar Jaguar.
- He bought a new house and he wanted to show us all the new house.
It was not a secret.
Because he said that she, Rosario, had money.
- He was in your eyes, living above his means.
But his answer to that was it was his wife's money.
- Yes.
- I was the only polygraph examiner in the Washington office at the time,
so I'd handle almost all the spy cases up till that time.
They said there's a handful of people they would have
had access to the cases that were compromised.
And they've all had polygraph tests recently.
We want you to go to the Agency and review their polygraph charts.
And the first two were clear. They were good charts.
And then when I got to Rick Ames, he's not getting
through on the question about money, but he gave them
an explanation, and the examiner never tested him further.
So when I came back, I said:
"These two I don't have any trouble with".
Do not clear Rick Ames.
Don't.
Don't take him off your radar.
- And I did review his polygraph files as well.
This one CIA polygrapher had written in the file.
"I am not accusing this person of being a spy, but I would not
be surprised to find that he's a spy."
- That's amazing that, that would go through and not have
somebody go back and redo it.
- A lot of this information about Rick
that was suspicious was out there.
But until Sandy and others started looking at it,
no one had ever put anything together.
Everybody had a piece.
No one had the whole.
But it was our responsibility to build an evidence base,
so we're trying to prove that this guy betrayed his country.
So there were several techniques that the bureau
had available to us.
We've got this group called our SSGs.
- Sure, the SSG.
- We put the Gs on Rick.
It was pretty much 24/7 that we were surveilling Rick.
If he was in the district, walking around on foot
with his wife, we were six steps behind him.
If he was driving around in his car or going anywhere,
we had cars all over him.
We had a airplane that surveilled him.
We bugged his house.
We knew that he was going to California.
And we had just a weekend to execute a search warrant
that we didn't get from a regular court
that we got from a FISA court.
Our guys had already determined weeks in advance
what type of lock Rick had
on his door and how to defeat it.
No lights were turned on, because Rick's neighbors
would have known that they were out of town.
So these guys go in and they put up that black tarp over
all the windows, using these little pin lights to get around.
They found an operational note that was going to be published
in The Washington Post want ads that was to his handler.
And the message, whatever the want ad was, would mean
something to you as the reader of the want ad and something
entirely different to the KGB handler.
That's just how these guys communicate.
[Barry]: Yeah. - You're looking at phones.
You're doing surveillance.
Do you do any type of trash covers?
- Yeah, we had a wonderful time going through his trash
and that really was one of the keys to this investigation
We had rented a house right across the street from him
that we had put a video camera on him.
We knew that the trash was picked up on Tuesday mornings.
We got the trash can from the house across the street
that we leased, and then we took Rick's trashcan
back to the offsite.
Everybody had to put on their government-approved OSHA
suits and our gloves and mask.
And then we started digging through his garbage.
- Yeah. - We're taking it out a layer
at a time, and we photograph each layer as we take it out,
and that's so that we can put it back into his trashcan
as exactly as we took it out.
Now, okay, that sounds like overkill.
But we're dealing with someone
we don't know how specialized trained he was.
Now, every time before we go out on Tuesday,
there was one of our Gs who went by the street name of Hooker.
[laughs] It was a guy.
And on this one occasion, we got back to the offsite
and we're pulling all the trash out and going through everything.
And one of the SSGs, J.R., he starts getting these yellow
pieces of that sticky note of paper.
- Yeah.
- And he starts putting together. We all start walking.
Hooker comes over, and he goes: "Man, kiss me. Kiss me."
[laughs] I'm feeling a little lucky,
so I just start putting sugar all over him at this point.
And sure enough, by the time we get that note put together
the sticky, torn pieces, it was an operational note
in Rick's handwriting that he had written to his KGB
handler here in DC, saying "unable to read Pipe," which was
the code name for one of the dead drop sites.
And then he put: "will meet B" and gave a date.
[suspenseful music]
We pretty quickly figured out that he was talking about Bogota.
He's planning a trip to Bogota.
[intense music]
Next, we put a group on the plane with him,
who also plan a trip to Bogota.
They followed him and they actually photographed him
meeting with his Moscow handler.
And then we, of course, we're monitoring
his telephone calls with Rosario.
The conversation was along the lines of: "Did you do it?"
And he would say: "Of course I did," or things like that.
[Rosario Ames]: The other thing that we have to do is,
if you do get the money and you think it might
be advisable, I would... what I would do,
would be to leave in cash..
You got the money in dollars, right?
[narrator]: Investigators now believe that Rosario
is in cahoots with her husband, and is actively aiding
and abetting his espionage activities.
- Probably one of the more difficult things we were tasked to do by both the CIA, the FBI,
and the National Security Council and DOJ, they said:
"we want this gift wrapped" and it was decided that
we were going to give to Rick a legitimate top-secret document
that we knew for a fact he would pass to the Russians
and we would have all of our sources around him
to catch him in that dead drop act.
And we know from some of the other stuff that
he did give away that some of it was really crucial
about our satellite program.
We videoed everything Rick did through a pinhole camera
in his ceiling, in his office.
And I saw all the papers that he looked through.
He looked at the page we wanted him to pay attention to, read
the text that went with the graph,
and then tossed it in his outbox.
And to a man, we all went:
"Oh my God, if he doesn't think
they'll be interested in this, what has he given them?"
- What year was it when you had to make a decision?
Okay, we've got enough information.
The U.S. Attorney's office said this is it.
We need to... - 1994.
[laughing]
It was... we set it up for
President's Day, February of 1994.
[narrator]: Ames is planning on attending a work conference
in Moscow later that month.
Investigators fear he might never return.
[Dell]: He was due to go out of the country for CIA business
and we could not take the risk of him leaving the country.
So the decision was made.
You got to take him down and you got to take him down now.
- Yeah.
- More would have been killed. - Yeah.
- Rick's supervisor, called Rick to come into the office that day
on a holiday to work on a report that only Rick
was intelligent enough to put together.
And we believe that would appeal to his ego.
And obviously it did.
When he was driving from his house,
he came up to a T-intersection
right around the corner from his house.
So we set up our cars at the stop sign
to where when Rick pulled up behind us, he stopped.
We jump out of our car.
Mike Donner, who is an excessively huge fellow,
[indistinct chatter] he's Barry sized.
Mike grabbed Rick out of the car and put his hands down
on the top of the car and did a quick pat down
because we believed Rick possibly might have
a weapon in the car.
And then I put the handcuffs on him and told him
he was under arrest for espionage.
And then we threw him in the back.
Well, we didn't throw anybody.
- You know.
- We gently placed him in the back seat of our car.
While we were in the car, driving to the offsite,
our other team had gone in to arrest Rosario.
- His wife. - His wife, in their house.
And the behavioral sciences people said: "make sure that Rick
hears over your radio that y'all were in his house searching it
and that his wife's got on handcuffs, too."
Well. - Good tactic.
- It just sucked the life right out of him.
And then we took him to an offsite that
the behavioral sciences people at Quantico
had told us how to set up.
We had files with his name on it, scattered on tables.
We had pictures of him that the SSGs had taken.
We had pictures of him in Bogota.
And when we brought Rick in and sat him down,
he was really pretty much still in a state of shock.
And he starts staring at these pictures.
Not long after that, they brought Rosario in.
She's got her hands cuffed behind her back, and she looks
at him and she starts going: "Rick, Rick!".
We take her, hurry her off to another side room,
we didn't want to harshly interrogate her.
We felt she was much more susceptible to a softer
interview interrogation because she was weeping.
She was extremely upset.
- Did you ever determine how much money he got at any time?
- It was a substantial... several million of dollars.
[Cindy]: Yeah. [Dell]: Plus a dacha on a river
[narrator]: Ames confesses that his betrayals began back in 1985
he states that he's given up "virtually all Soviet agents
he knows about, on United States foreign, defense and security policies."
[Barry]: By this time, Ames has entered a plea, confessed.
He's got a sentence.
Life without parole.
Right off, he said: "I told the FBI everything,
plus some stuff that they wouldn't have known.
So I know what you're going to ask."
And all the questions, the main questions Ames failed.
I mean, big fails.
His failures were so clear, I think he held back
some really good stuff for whatever reason.
- And, Barry, you polygraphed her as well?
[Barry]: They bring her in after.
And the main issues with Rosario is,
when did she know what he was doing?
Had she been involved in helping him
take an active part in anything?
And she had trouble with both of them.
- Sandy, when he was arrested, how did that impact you?
What were your first thoughts when you found out that day?
- It was wonderful.
I was thrilled.
He's an evil human being.
Period.
- The man is going to spend his life...
- That's right. - When he looks out the window
to see what the other side looks like,
there'll be bars on the window.
[Dell]: He hurt us so bad.
And how do you put a value on a human life?
He had those 10 people executed.
[indistinct chatter] To protect himself.
He was concerned that they would become aware of his identity
and let the CIA know that he was spying for the Russians,
so he methodically had them recalled to Moscow
and executed just for self-protection.
And that makes him the worst traitor...
[Cindy]: Absolutely. -...in this nation's history.
And it's like: "thank God, we got him."
We've stopped this guy, and no one else is going to die.
I can go home now. - Yes.
[ominous music]
Subtitling: difuze