Jesus James Angleton: an all-purpose excuse.

• Position: Former CIA counterintelligence chief

On December 5, 1990, the CIA's Counterintelligence Center, where Aldrich Ames was assigned at the time, sent a memo to the Office of Security requesting a reinvestigation of him. The memo listed several suspicious facts: Ames' purchase of a house for $540,000 in cash, and its expensive redecoration and renovation, the purchase of a Jaguar for $49,500, and various large bank transactions. The memorandum notes that there is "a degree of urgency" in the request since the CIC had been limiting Ames' access to sensitive information, but it was "quickly running out of things for him to do without granting him greater access."

The degree of urgency may be surmised from the government's "Statement of Facts" submitted in connection with the plea bargain. Just twelve days after the CIC's memo was sent, according to this statement, "Ames obtained valuable intelligence information regarding a KGB officer cooperating with the CIA. Ames prepared a letter...advising the KGB of this information...." It is not clear whether Ames obtained this information officially or through corridor gossip.

In either case, the CIA's lack of a "counterintelligence mentality" is striking. Either the CIC provided Ames access to sensitive information just days after expressing serious concerns about his reliability, or the general atmosphere at Langley was such that this type of information was passed around via corridor gossip regardless of "need to know."

Faced with this kind of record, Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey, in a speech designed to rebut Ames-related criticism, resorted to the CIA's all-purpose excuse: James Jesus Angleton, the agency's leading mole-hunter, whose search for traitors had paralyzed the CIA during the height of the Cold War. Despite the fact that Angleton had been sacked almost twenty years earlier, Woolsey claimed that, even in 1994, the CIA's "culture with respect to security and counterintelligence" should be viewed in the light of "a reaction against the highly centralized management...