SG: There was really only one reason I decided to join what has been termed the mole hunt team. I was going to resign my work from CIA. I was not old enough at the time to retire, but I was satisfied professionally. I had a family that I wanted to spend more time with and Paul Redman was aware of my plans to resign and he came to me and he said, Sandy, there's something that I would like you to do. And he told me about Jeanne's plans to take one more look the loss of our agents in 1985 and 1986 and he asked me if I would join Jeanne in doing that and I said, it's the only thing that would keep me here and yes, I'd be honored to work with Jeanne. And I felt if there was anything that I could do or make a contribution to at least try and find out what happened..., I didn't owe just Polyakov, I owed all those other assets and I also... I felt strongly, and I think Jeanne would agree with me, we also owed our employees, our officers who had died abroad, what... didn't make any difference whether they were working Soviet operations or not, but we owed all these people who had made the sacrifice.

SG: All of us who worked against the Soviet target, Soviet East European target understood up-front that it was a dangerous business, that if people were caught, they'd be executed. But at the same time, you go through this day in day out. It is a business. We're not here for fun and games, we're here to collect intelligence and after year one, year two, year three, year ten, you have success after success after success, it becomes ingrained in you. You really couldn't see that there was going to be a failure. I think in some respects it was hard to accept that we would lose agents, because we were very good at what we did and we trained our agents to be very good at what they did. So then all of a sudden, when you're told your asset, the KGB officer you're running in country X has been caught, you know, it was like a brick falling on your head. It was a terrible, terrible reminder of the seriousness of what we did for a living, that we had responsibility for human lives, we had responsibility for producing intelligence, that certainly was the business aspect of it. I mean we didn't run these people just because we liked them. We had a job to do and what's important is they understood it as well as we, and Polyakov, I think, was a perfect example. When we had meetings with him, it was serious business. There wasn't chitchat, there weren't drinks. We only had a limited amount of time with him on each occasion and he had a lot to give us and important things to discuss and it was all business, because, as I say, I think in some respects he understood the seriousness of it, or had a better appreciation of the seriousness of it far better than we, that he also knew that his life was on the line.

SG: I think these cases take a long time to sort through for a couple of reasons, and let's just take Rick. We have a hundred and something names, now what's so terribly important... Well, I personally felt that Rick was probably the spy. What if I'm wrong? Then the person who is the spy gets away. So you have to go through in excruciating detail, looking at absolutely everything. The other aspect is for each, what I would term clue, this continues to point the finger to Rick. he went down to visit his mother-in-law in Columbia, and he went on such and such a date, and Rosario didn't go with him. Well, there are a number of explanations for this, the least of which might be spying, and we were in a bind frequently. You know, OK, Rick's getting money, he's getting money from somewhere. How can we prove it he's getting it from the Soviets? He might be running drugs, he might be bringing emeralds in from Columbia, there were always so many different explanations that you had to go through, each one, until you eliminated it, and often you simply didn't have a complete answer.

SG: I forgot he was smuggling coffee too.

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SG: Before I describe the incident where everything as far as I was concerned fell into place, I think it's important to give you just a little bit of background. I had been working on a chronology of Rick's life and I referred to it as a daily log of his activities. Every piece of information we had about Rick, from our files, you know, when he entered the building, when he left the building for a cigarette break, when he came back in the building from the cigarette break, when he went to lunch, credit card charges, including the amounts, the stores, any description of the items and all of this was just mind-numbing work, but went into a computer run and we called it the famous chronology. In addition to that, I had reviewed all of Rick's Soviet and East European contacts, those people he had legitimate reason to be in touch with, because that was his job as a CIA Soviet East European division case officer. So I entered all of this information on the computer. Dan Payne, who was working with Jeanne and myself on the task force, had just received, and as I recall it was after five o'clock one afternoon, had just received records from one of the banks Rick had and Dan is reading these things off and I'm entering them in the computer and, my God, it was unbelievable. On seventeen May, Rick had reported having had lunch with his Soviet contact Chuvakhin , eighteen May there's a deposit into his checking account for nine thousand dollars. Well, it was getting kind of exciting, but that was only one, and this was 1985, which of course was the critical year. Then there were two other matches we had - I can't remember the exact dates, whether it was fourteen July he had a meeting with Chuvakhin, fifteen July another cash deposit - also all the cash deposits were under ten thousand dollars. Well, three matches don't make a conviction, but in my mind, Rick was the spy and it was really that simple. As I've always said, it didn't take a rocket scientist to add one plus one plus one.

SG: I'm not really the one to ask that question, it's an FBI thing, but I think it is important, at least from my perspective, that when I started this with Jeanne, just like I never dreamed that Rick Ames would become a traitor in the 1970's, I never dreamed that what we were doing would lead to the arrest and conviction of Rick or whomever it might be for espionage, never ever believed that. I thought that we would come up with the answer, but I just didn't believe in what was peacetime we'd ever see a conviction. So the day that sentencing was passed was a very strange day. It was complete relief, but again almost still disbelief that Jeez, it actually worked, we actually did it and he'll spend the rest of his life in jail.

SG: We were at work, Jeanne and I were at work, waiting for work from the FBI, along with many other people, FBI agents and such, yes. It was... when was it?

SG: The arrest was relief.

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SG: The arrest of Rick Ames, I think, to all of us involved, particularly from the CIA standpoint, was one of relief. That said, we also had to look forward to everything that was going to happen with respect to the press, the congress, the entire media show and I'm not so certain that we were prepared for the outcry. We anticipated such an outcry, because as I've always said, gee to me, and I'm certain to Jeanne, Rick Ames was a success story. We found a spy based on analysis. It had never happened before. Counter-intelligence is finding spies, it's finding out your worst secrets., winning the Super Bowl should have been... we had a wonderful trophy, we had Rick Ames and then we were crucified for finding out about Rick. But that is counter-intelligence, you can't have it both ways.

SG: I think all of us involved in our task force had a difficult time and will always have a difficult time understanding why any CIA officer would become a traitor. And it was particular difficult with Rick certainly because we knew him personally, but we were also aware that whoever it was, we would know, we would have known them personally, simply because of the type of information they had access to. So we had come to grips with that, but the one thing that at least I kept asking, whoever did it knew what the consequences were going to be when they gave up the names and in this case Rick. He knew that Polyakov would be shot, he knew all of 'em would be shot. I don't have an answer. I'm not so certain Rick Ames has an answer as to why he did it, as to why he gave up the names, because he certainly could have been paid big bucks for all kinds of other things. He didn't have to give up human lives.

SG: I certainly am not a psychiatrist, but I think Rick has always wanted to be special, to be important. I do know he felt himself intellectually superior to all of us and particularly his contemporaries., he was far brighter than we. His career was not going anywhere. He was not being recognized for his abilities. And maybe this was revenge, maybe this is a way of making himself look important in the KGB's eyes.

SG: Well... Rick certainly had to justify in his own mind... giving up all the names and I don't think with Polyakov that he really thought much about it. But I don't know. I mean, it's something he's really never talked about, or at least when he has, to my mind explained it satisfactorily. You know, he likes to say, phew, that's just part of the game, these people knew what was going to happen to them.

SG: [Interrupts] No, no, no.

SG: It's not that I'm ducking it.... I guess I was rhetorically asking myself that question. I don't think Rick thought about it. I don't think he cared. I think he was caught up in this whole business.

SG: Yes...

SG: Dunlap, Okhota, Drummond, they all gotten long... they got [inaudible] terms, but no one was executed.

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SG: I don't feel that that description is fair. To me, and a pretty straightforward approach to it, satellites don't think and satellites can't think, people are the ones who think. People are the ones who explain intentions and without the human source, I don't think we would have won the Cold War. I've always believed that in order to win anything, you have to know your enemy better than your enemy knows you. it was a little bit easier for the KGB to try to learn about us, become we have freedom of speech, freedom of the press, there's so much out there that's available that tells them what kind of people we are, how we approach problems. Whereas for our intelligence service it was very difficult. Everything was secret in the Soviet Union. We didn't have such a luxury and I firmly believe that intelligence played a vital role in our acquiring that information and in particular people like General Polyakov and in the end, we won. The Cold War is over and the Soviet Union was dissolved.

END OF INTERVIEW