2021
Hello ,
Not my words.
One of the women responsible for catching Aldrich (Rick) Ames said he never respected the women who worked with him in the CIA. He thought they were "dumb broads."
“To the minute he was arrested, he had no idea he was in trouble," said Sandy Grimes. "He believed we were so incompetent that [we would] never be smart enough to track [him] down."
And maybe they never would have, except for Jeanne Vertefeuille (pronounced VER-teh-fay), who refused to retire until the traitor was caught.
The Women Who Brought Down the Worst Spy in American History
Jeanne worked as Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Gabon in 1986, when
she got an urgent a cable headquarters in Langley, Va.
"‘I want you to come…when you come back, I want you to work for me, and I have a Soviet problem….I want you to work on it.”
Soviets passing information to the CIA. ("assets" in spy language) had vanished. Communication from an alarming number of assets had ceased in the last half of 1985. During the Cold War, disappearing agents meant dead agents.
Jeanne was assigned to head a small task force to investigate. Jeanne and her team of relatively low-ranking officials started combing through CIA records pertaining to operations in the Soviet Union.
The agency did not believe one of their own could be a traitor. They assumed some break in the paper trail, some outsider intercepting communication, had fingered the
assets in Moscow.
Below: Jeanne Vertefeuille circa 1990.
Jeanne and members of her task force worked in the same office as Aldrich Ames. He seemed to lack confidence, but didn't hide his scorn for the women in
the office.
Jeanne was a career officer who specialized in Soviet spy craft, and she was completely dedicated to the CIA. She applied for a job after learning about the intelligence agency at a college job fair. It was suggested she complete secretarial school before taking a position.
Below: Jeanne Vertefeille at work during her early years at the CIA.
At University, Jeanne had French and German. After joining the CIA, she learned Russian and was assigned to various foreign posts including Ethiopia, Finland and The Hague.
Living alone, walking to work, remaining purposefully nondescript, Jeanne didn't even tell family she worked for the CIA. Despite her dedication, the investigation into missing Moscow assets was exhausting and her task force followed clues that got them nowhere.
Little by little, Jeanne and the others were pulled off the task force and assigned to other more pressing operations.
After his arrest as a traitor, Ames bragged that he'd told his Soviet handler, "“Why not put a big neon sign over the agency with the word ‘Mole’ written on it?”
Even as Ames appeared to become a changed man, more confident, improved teeth, wearing $600 Italian loafers and driving a jaguar, he did not fall under suspicion.
By 1991, Jeanne was approaching retirement, which was mandatory at age 60. By this time, the CIA knew at least ten of their missing Soviet agents had been executed or imprisoned.
Jeanne had not been able to forget the case and asked superiors if she could spend her final months of work trying to solve it. Sandy Grimes had been a handler for one of the executed agents and she, too, was eager to discover who was to blame.
Below: Sandy Grimes, circa 1990.
Sandy and Jeanne compiled a list of anyone and everyone in the CIA who had had access to the names of the agents who disappeared. They quickly eliminated many of the 198 people, finally narrowing it to three. Ames was one of the three.
We asked everyone the same questions, no deviation," said Sandy. "Jeanne was a genius, she was the one who devised the [last] question. It was a marvelous question. 'If you were going to volunteer to the soviet government, how would you go about it?'"
Others answered the question by theorizing myriad possibilities of how they might connect with the Soviets and become double agents. Sandy and Jeanne figured Rick Ames would appreciate the intellectual challenge this question presented.
"He loved the what if questions his whole career, but he was so taken aback.
His reaction was so opposite of what we would have expected of Rick. [He]
could not conceive of Jeanne or I finding a KGB penetration of the CIA, We were both females. He seriously consider us to be dumb broads. He didn’t think we would ever, ever pinpoint him."
But Ames gave himself away in that interview and soon they discovered that large cash deposits to his bank account correlated with meetings he had with Soviet official back in 1985. The meetings had not appeared suspicious at the time because they had been within the scope of his agency work.
Now the FBI joined the investigation and discovered incriminating evidence in Ames' garbage and on his computer.
In 1993, the FBI found this note by Aldrich Ames concerning a meeting with his KGB contact in Bogota, Columbia, in the trash. FBI / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images
Ames was arrested on February 21, 1994, and pleaded guilty, admitting that on June 13, 1985, he turned over the identities of “virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me.”
At the time, Ames was chief of the CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence branch. He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. In total, he betrayed at least 30 agents, eleven of whom were executed. The KGB stated Ames was paid $4.6 million dollars for CIA secrets. He's serving a life sentence in federal prison.
Jeanne continued to consult with the CIA after her retirement, serving the intelligence agency 58 years, working until just prior to her death in 2012. According to the CIA, she is remember as a driven, focused officer who demanded excellence and was always devoted to the mission.
Jeanne Vertefeuille started her career when nearly all spies were men, paving the way for women in the CIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3wRWeEEptI
www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/us/jeanne-vertefeuille-who-helped-catch-aldrich-ames-dies-at-80.html
www.cia.gov/stories/story/spy-catcher-jeanne-vertefeuille/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/still-unexplained-cold-war-fbi-cia-180956969/
Huge thanks to you all who voted on my author photo last week! I really appreciate your input. First and second choices are featured on the home page of my website www.MaryCronkFarrell.com.
If you're holiday shopping early, here are some great books for kids about women spies and code breakers.
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