They Wouldn't Know a Mole If It Bit Them

As a rookie spy, he left a briefcase stuffed with classified documents on a New York City subway train. He strewed clandestine communications gear around his office, unsecured. He couldn't account for Company money or for himself. His falling-down-drunk episodes were legion, including one at a CIA Christmas party when he had to be carted home. Even when sober, he had incompetence written all over him. A pre-employment psychological assessment found him lacking the people skills essential for spy work. Yet the CIA, desperate for warm bodies during the Vietnam War, hired him anyway. His first boss, the station chief in Ankara, Turkey, warned that the new agent was so inept at recruiting agents that he should never be sent to the field again.

That wise counsel was ignored, as was a profusion of red flags that marked the sorry career of Aldrich Hazen Ames, 53, who was finally convicted last April after spying nine years for the Soviet Union. Intelligence documents obtained last week by TIME, including parts of the CIA inspector general's report on the Ames case, illustrate how badly the agency bungled its handling of the agent. Strong evidence of his poor performance, and later his treason, were ignored for years by an old-boy network that included friends of Ames' father Carleton, himself a hard-drinking CIA veteran.

Tensions between the Old Guard and CIA Director James Woolsey, a political appointee, erupted last week when Woolsey learned that two top agency officials had on Sept. 29 given an award to a retiring field officer under investigation in the Ames case. That agent, Milton Bearden, who has retired as chief of the CIA station in Bonn, is widely respected for his work in helping Muslim rebels drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. But Bearden has also been reprimanded for his inattention to Ames' activities when he was the spy's boss in 1989. Woolsey had ordered that none of those reprimanded in the Ames case be given promotions, raises or commendations. Last week he demoted the officers who violated that order; both men then retired rather than accept a lower rank.

Members of Congress who oversee the CIA viewed the episode as a characteristic case of arrogance within the agency's Directorate of Operations, the branch in charge of covert missions. And, said a White House official, "What we can't understand is why Woolsey keeps loyally defending an operations directorate that keeps thumbing its nose at him. He needs to clean house." Critics will gain ammunition from the fresh details contained in classified documents. Among them: