page_title: 1995 CIA disinformation controversy
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: 1995 CIA disinformation controversy / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: The FBI wanted poster for en:Edward Lee Howard. Public domain work of a US government agency. From own collection.
context_page_description: The 1995 CIA disinformation controversy arose when the Central Intelligence Agency revealed that between 1986 and 1994, it had delivered intelligence reports to the U.S. government based on agent reporting from confirmed or suspected Soviet operatives. From 1985 to his arrest in February 1994, CIA officer and KGB mole Aldrich Ames compromised Agency sources and operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, leading to the arrest of many CIA agents and the execution of at least ten of them. This allowed the KGB to replace the CIA agents with its own operatives or to force them to cooperate, and the double agents then funneled a mixture of disinformation and true material to U.S. intelligence. Although the CIA's Soviet-East European and Central Eurasian divisions knew or suspected the sources to be Soviet double agents, they nevertheless disseminated this "feed" material within the government. Some of these intelligence reports even reached Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, as well as President-elect Bill Clinton.
  The disclosure of the deception in 1995, following investigations into the Ames case, led to a media stir and heavy congressional criticism.
context_section_description: Aldrich Ames, a CIA counterintelligence agent working in the SE Division, approached the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. on April 16, 1985, and within a month received $50,000 from the KGB in exchange for espionage service. Meeting with Soviet official and go-between Sergey Dmitriyevich Chuvakhin on June 13, Ames passed him copied documents identifying over ten Soviet agents working for the CIA and FBI. As a CIA review related,  the Soviets began arresting and sometimes executing U.S. operatives later in 1985, and the CIA realized that it "was faced with a major CI problem." Suspicions initially fell on Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA officer who also compromised CIA operations in 1985 and defected to the Soviet Union on September 21. However, the CIA realized by fall 1985 that Howard was not responsible for all of the damage. Three agents arrested in fall 1985 and later executed, some of the CIA's most valuable sources, had been betrayed by Ames, not Howard. By December, six SE agents had vanished, a trend which continued into 1986; according to a congressional report, the over 20 operations Ames revealed "amounted to a virtual collapse of the CIA's Soviet operations." Ames, who stated that he spied for the KGB due to his financial debt, gave thousands of pages of classified documents to the Soviets and later admitted to disclosing over 100 CIA, FBI, military, and allied operations; he was deemed responsible for the arrests and executions of ten U.S. sources.
  Moreover, by compromising CIA methods, Ames enabled the KGB and its successor, the SVR, to filter feed material to the CIA from 1986 to 1993. In 1987, KGB agent Aleksandr Zhomov offered to sell the CIA intelligence on how the Soviets had detected and arrested the CIA's agents. The SE Division accepted Zhomov and assigned him the cryptonym GTPROLOGUE. Zhomov, who was actually a Soviet double agent assigned to protect Ames, furnished fake documents ascribing the CIA's agent losses to superior KGB surveillance and luck. He then told the CIA that he would identify upcoming KGB plants, but only on the condition that the CIA treat them as genuine, lest the KGB discover the leak and arrest him. The fake agents soon overwhelmed Moscow Station's resources, and Zhomov disappeared in July 1990 after receiving payment from the U.S. The spurious sources and the disinformation they provided reportedly convinced the CIA that the 1985–1986 debacle was an anomaly, thus protecting Ames. Other genuine CIA agents were compromised by the Soviets, who used them to feed false intelligence back to the U.S.
  The CIA began to investigate the disappearances of its agents, initially suspecting that bad tradecraft, a Soviet breach of Moscow Station or the CIA's communications, or a mole was responsible for the disaster. Suspicions fell on spy dust (METKA), a KGB compromise of CIA cables, or new Soviet surveillance tactics, but these probes proved unsuccessful. Ames' conspicuous spending drew the attention of the molehunters in late 1989, but he passed a polygraph test. However, the molehunt regained momentum in 1991 as it received more officers to work on the case. Attention focused on Ames and other suspects, and his finances were investigated once more in 1992; in August, the investigators linked Ames' bank deposits with his meetings with the Soviets. In March 1993, the molehunter unit concluded that there was a KGB mole within the CIA who had followed Howard, and the FBI began close surveillance of Ames, monitoring his office and home, and tracking his car. A June 25 search of his office found about 144 classified documents unrelated to his work; an analysis of his finances found an unexplained $1,326,310; and subsequent searches of Ames' trash and residence found further documents on CIA operations and agents, as well as Ames' own espionage for the KGB. On February 21, 1994, Ames and his wife, Rosario, were arrested by FBI agents: The duo pled guilty to espionage, and the Senate Intelligence Committee requested that the CIA's Inspector General review the case.
caption: FBI wanted poster of U.S. defector Edward Lee Howard.
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