For 20 years, Ben Fischer was a praiseworthy officer of the CIA. Then, two years ago, Fischer says, a procession of rumor, gossip, hearsay and innuendo ruined his career.
His story, as he tells it in a federal lawsuit filed on Friday, is a dispatch from the CIA's Siberia. The suit describes Washington at its worst - Kafkaesque bureaucracy, shoddy journalism, selective leaks and lethal backbiting.It describes the fear that gripped the intelligence agency after the arrest in 1994 of Aldrich Ames, Moscow's mole inside the agency. And it asserts that Fischer was betrayed by his fellow spies, by his wife, by a old friend in the CIA and by a celebrated secret agent.
Fischer turns 50 in September. He "remains a pariah among his former friends and colleagues at the agency, who remain uncertain why Fischer was banished," says his lawsuit, which seeks the return of his career and reputation.
A CIA official said the agency could not comment on the case. But from the agency's point of view, Fischer is the betrayer, not the betrayed.
Ben Fischer was 26 years old, a budding expert in Soviet affairs with advanced degrees and impressive fellowships when he joined the CIA in 1973.
The man who recruited him introduced him to another intelligence officer, the woman he would marry. The matchmaker-officer was a mercurial former marine, David Sullivan, a man with strong views about Soviet treachery and American perfidy.
Throughout the Cold War, Ben and his wife, Mary, focused on Moscow and its minions. But in 1989, like the Soviet empire, their marriage began falling apart. Fischer's lawsuit says he learned that his wife "had begun an intimate relationship" with a highly placed superior, Steve Weber.
Weber was already a legend in the agency, a Hungarian official who defected to the United States in the 1950s, spied for the CIA throughout Eastern Europe during the Cold War and rose to the third-highest slot in the agency's Soviet Europe division. "Younger officers worshiped him," recalled David Forden, a retired agency officer.
Fischer's suit says his bosses told him that his career would be ruined if he took his wife and Weber to court. The divorce was handled quietly.
Afterward, Fischer threw himself into his work, writing and lecturing within the intelligence community on a series of blown covert operations in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
His work, the lawsuit says, infuriated his superiors because it faulted them for the fact that operation after secret operation had failed, and agent after agent had been betrayed and executed, and no one knew why.
The answer seemed clear when Ames was arrested in February 1994. Ames later confessed to selling the agency's deepest secrets to Moscow for more than $2 million. But in the days after the arrest, deep fear gripped the CIA.
Agents of the FBI were swarming over CIA headquarters, searching for evidence of treason and the spoor of a second mole. The suit says an immediate superior "urged Fischer not to tell the FBI anything" and warned him that the agency was keeping track of every officer who talked to the bureau.
Fischer went ahead and talked to bureau agents, three times. The third time, the FBI showed him a copy of a letter - "the snitch fax" - and asked if he wrote it.
The fax, sent to the Senate intelligence committee on or about April Fool's Day 1994, appeared later in The Washington Times, the capital's politically conservative daily newspaper, which falsely described it as "a CIA memorandum." The fax said Weber was in all likelihood a Soviet spy inside the agency: another Aldrich Ames.
Weber had been in charge of all the failed espionage operations against the Soviet Union and "all of the failed operations against the East Germans," the letter said.
Weber, the fax suggested, had died in a prostitute's bed in Budapest - "murdered by the KGB" in 1993, "to protect the secret of his role as a mole." This went on for five unsigned pages, a farrago of falsehoods and rumors with a sprinkling of half-truths, most of them aimed at Weber, who, in fact, died in Budapest in 1993.
The CIA's suspicions as to its authorship fell immediately on Fischer because of the affair his wife had with Weber. Some present and former CIA officers still think he wrote the fax.
In fact, his friend, David Sullivan, who recruited Fischer to the CIA, eventually admitted writing the fax. Sullivan's views had long ago put him on a collision course with the agency. He was forced out of the CIA in 1978 after he was caught leaking secret agency documents that said the Soviet Union had cheated on the arms control treaty.
Fischer concedes only that he did not tell his bosses everything he told the FBI, which was especially interested in his former wife, by then romantically attached to a former chief of Hungarian intelligence, his lawsuit says.
The CIA's unhappiness came to a head on April 25, 1994. The agency placed Fischer on administrative leave, suspended his security clearances and ordered him to undergo - and pay for - seven medical and psychological tests.
He remained suspended throughout 1994 and had to check in daily with a CIA liaison officer to report his whereabouts. He says that the officer told him that the agency's chief of covert operations, Ted Price, was especially angry with him for talking to the FBI. Price, in the meantime, was officially reprimanded for his failures in the Ames case.
Finally, a compromise was reached last year. Fischer could return to work, but not to covert operations. Instead, he had a dry-as-dust assignment analyzing old cases from the Cold War.
Now things have changed at the CIA. A new director, John Deutch, dismissed most of the old barons, including Price, and vowed to change the way the agency treats its people.
Fischer may have a chance to discuss the matter with senior agency officials in October, when he is to receive a prize for a paper about Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, written from his internal exile.