Indeed they say if anyone is to blame it is Mr Hitz who failed to mention the practice in an earlier

Indeed, they say if anyone is to blame it is Mr Hitz, who failed to mention the practice in an earlier report. Not relishing such invidious judgement of his peers, the current CIA director let them off the hook. But Congress many not be so easily satisfied.One influential Democrat, Bob Kerrey, vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, insists that unless the three are held personally accountable, “I don’t know how the CIA will ever recover credibility with customers who are basing billion-dollar and life-and-death decisions on that intelligence.” Mr Kerrey’s chance may come this week, when the three are expected to be summoned to testify at fresh hearings into the fiasco.One thing though is clear, that Mr Deutch’s task of restoring the prestige and morale of the battered CIA is harder than ever. The Pentagon is launching a study to assess the damage, and officials say “billions of dollars” may have been wasted on weapons the country did not need.If so, and by a fine stroke of irony, Moscow would have successfully imitated one US strategy in the closing stages of the Cold War: of trying to bleed one’s superpower opponent dry by forcing him into an ever more costly arms race.

The US may have won in the end, but the Kremlin may have scored smaller victories along the way.For Mr Deutch, the CIA’s blundering was “an inexcusable lapse in elementary intelligence practices” – so inexcusable that Mr Hitz is said to have sought reprimands for three former directors, William Webster, Robert Gates, and James Woolsey who resigned at the end of 1994 amid congressional fury over his refusal to mete out stern punishment to agency officers involved with the Ames debacle.For the time being, the trio have wriggled out of trouble by sending a joint letter to Mr Deutch protesting that they were not informed that suspect information was being passed to the White House. data supplied by Soviet agents installed by the KGB to replace those betrayed by Ames during his nine years of treachery, between 1985 and 1994 – was contained in top-secret “blue border” intelligence reports, delivered by hand to a president.On the basis of this bogus information, purporting to show hitherto unsuspected weapons advances by Moscow, the US may have decided to go ahead with fresh arms programmes of its own. Since then one embarrassment after another has been heaped upon the agency, as it attempts to gauge the full extent of the havoc wreaked by its former Soviet branch counter- intelligence chief, now serving a life sentence without parole in a federal prison in Pennsylvania.None though has matched the admission of Mr Deutch on Capitol Hill last week that a new, post-Ames internal investigation by the CIA’s inspector general, Frederick Hitz, had shown that “tainted” information – i.e. After being numbed by the Ames affair, excoriated over Guatemala and caught red-handed spying against two US allies, the agency now admits supplying a succession of presidents with intelligence on the Soviet Union and Russia which it knew almost certainly came from agents controlled by Moscow.Such is the latest – but in all likelihood not the final – chapter of the case of Aldrich Ames, played out before aghast congressional committees, which at one point came close to eliciting an unheard-of formal reprimand by John Deutch, the CIA director, of no fewer than three of his predecessors.It has been more than 20 months since Ames was arrested after being unmasked as the most damaging mole in CIA history.

“Russia! Labour! People power! Socialism! These are our slogans,” a ruddy-faced Mr Zyuganov thundered.. RUPERT CORNWELL

Washington
For the CIA these days, just when it seems matters cannot get worse, they do. Although the rally is nominally to mark the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, they are also certain to use the occasion to celebrate their lofty position in the polls, which suggest that they will emerge strongly from next month’s parliamentary elections.Gennady Zyuganov, head of the Communist Party, is making full use of Mr Yeltsin’s absence, citing his health as one reason that he should step down.Addressing a rally in Moscow, he said Russia’s authorities were “out of control” and rattled off a list of Soviet-style slogans that will worry those who are unconvinced by the Communists’ claims to be a moderate progressive party. It appears he may indeed be improving, albeit slowly.It remains to be seen whether he will feel quite so well after today’s march through the streets of Moscow by thousands of Communists, some of his strongest political foes. Their claims were met with scepticism among Russians, especially when his doctors barred all visits, saying he would need to be under close medical supervision until the end of this month.But on Friday the President was visited by his Prime Minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and was shown on television looking weak and slightly disorientated, but claiming to feel “not bad”. PHIL REEVES

Moscow
Russians yesterday received the most positive bulletin yet about the health of their President, Boris Yeltsin, who was rushed to hospital 13 days ago amid worldwide concern that his heart trouble would cause the end of his political career.Mr Yeltsin was looking “fine”, was “absolutely capable of working”, and was beavering away at Russia’s economic problems, said one of his closest associates, the first deputy prime minister, Oleg Soskovets, after visiting him in the Central Clinical Hospital.Since Mr Yeltsin’s heart attack, the Kremlin has been at pains to emphasise that he is in control of the country, although it initially provided precious little evidence to support this. It was the most serious violation of the ceasefire that was declared in Bosnia on 12 October..