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

DATE: FRIDAY, January 27, 1995                   TAG: 9501270063
SECTION: NATL/INTL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

SPY REVEALED HIMSELF IN TORN-UP NOTE

Taking heat because surveillance teams had been given the slip by Aldrich Ames, FBI supervisor Les Wiser, without his boss's approval, ordered a risky pickup of the garbage outside Ames' house. What the FBI found convinced them they had uncovered Russia's spy inside the CIA.

``It was a marvelous piece of insubordination,'' said Robert ``Bear'' Bryant, assistant FBI director for national security. Bryant told reporters Thursday that if Wiser had asked, he would not have let him launch his midnight trash pickup Sept. 15, 1993, for fear neighbors might tip off Ames that someone was snooping around.

What Wiser's agents found in the trash container outside Ames' $500,000 Northern Virginia home were seven pieces of a torn-up yellow Post-It note barely two inches square. On it, Ames had printed a message for the Russians, trying to set up a meeting in Bogota, Colombia.

Wiser handed the reassembled note to Bryant about 6:30 a.m. Sept. 16 and told him, ``We've solved it.''

Wiser said, ``We knew he was the guy when we found that note.''

Bryant and Wiser gave reporters an inside look Thursday at key points in their 21/2-year hunt for the Soviet mole in the CIA. Ames caused the death of 10 Western agents and compromised dozens of operations.

He is serving a life term without parole; his wife, Rosario, is serving a five-year sentence.

Among other disclosures, the FBI said:

One Russian diplomat, whom they did not name, was tossed out of the United States after Ames' arrest in February 1994 for supervising Ames.

After sentencing, Ames volunteered information the FBI would never have known otherwise, but still had problems on a polygraph test when asked whether he had told everything he knows.

They were occasionally dissatisfied with the CIA's cooperation. The CIA failed to answer FBI questions about Ames' activities as early as 1986. Ames became a Soviet spy in 1985.

by CNB