
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 6, 1994                   TAG: 9403060167
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

E. GERMAN FILES LED TO CIA ARREST

Revelations in former East German intelligence files prompted the creation of a joint CIA-FBI investigative effort three years ago that went on to uncover alleged spying by CIA official Aldrich Ames, according to sources familiar with the probe.

Some counterintelligence officials suspected as early as 1985 that U.S. spy operations had been betrayed. But separate CIA and FBI probes languished for years, riven by bureaucratic haggling and rivalries that did not abate until 1991 when the joint effort was stitched together, the sources said.

The East German files revealed that all the spies the United States was thought to have recruited in the Stasi intelligence service were in fact double agents, the officials said. Shaken by this discovery, the CIA finally agreed to join with the FBI in an aggressive internal probe, suspecting that someone inside the CIA perhaps had helped the Stasi pull off the deception.

Investigators listed about 200 people who not only had known the identities of the Stasi agents but had known of failed operations against the Soviet Union.

Ames fell under suspicion, along with others, because he had dealt with some of the East German agents and had known of the operations against the Soviets.

By May 1993, Ames had become the focus of a criminal investigation. He was arrested on Feb. 21 because of concerns he might flee.

Ames's ability to elude detection for years was helped not just by the earlier lack of CIA-FBI coordination but also by lax internal security procedures and a series of lapses by government investigators, according to officials briefed on the investigation. These lapses included a failure until recently to monitor Ames's overseas travel, probe his sudden wealth, guard against the theft from CIA headquarters of highly classified documents and detect unauthorized contacts between Ames and Russian officials.

The FBI is technically the lead federal agency in domestic counterintelligence efforts aimed at ferreting out spies for other governments, and the CIA is responsible for monitoring its own employees. But before 1991, FBI and congressional officials said, senior CIA managers generally played down the possibility that one of their key employees could be a turncoat and blocked independent scrutiny by the FBI of some failed spy operations.

by CNB