Warrenton Training Center
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The Warrenton Training Center, known inside the agency as the WTC, is a secret CIA communications facility in Warrenton, Virginia. It enters John Kiriakou's account of the Aldrich Ames case not as a site of espionage but as the address Soviet intelligence invented to keep the agency looking away from Ames.

In 1986 Ames told his handlers that he feared becoming a suspect. When the mole hunt eventually resumed, the KGB "threw US investigators off of Ames's trail by constructing an elaborate diversion": a Soviet case officer told a CIA contact that the mole was in fact stationed at Warrenton.

The agency took the bait. Mole hunters investigated ninety employees at the facility for almost a year and came up with ten possible suspects, although, Kiriakou notes, the lead investigator recorded that "there are so many problem personalities that no single one stands out."

What finally exposed Ames, on Kiriakou's telling, was not the counterintelligence apparatus at all: "It wasn't so much the agency's work that eventually outed Ames as it was Ames's own complete stupidity. But then greed has never made anyone smarter." The pattern analysis that did break the case belonged to Sandy Grimes.

See also

- Aldrich Ames
- Sandy Grimes
- James Jesus Angleton
- Central Intelligence Agency
