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Warrenton Training Center

A secret CIA communications facility in Warrenton, Virginia, which — per John Kiriakou — the KGB used as a decoy to protect Aldrich Ames. When Ames warned Moscow in 1986 that he feared becoming a suspect, a Soviet case officer told a CIA contact that the mole was posted to Warrenton; agency mole hunters then spent almost a year investigating ninety employees there and produced ten suspects, none of them Ames.

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.[1]

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.[1]

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.”[1][2]

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.[2]

See also

References

  1. John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-02-13 · Transcript
  2. John Kiriakou's Dead Drop, 2026-02-13 · Transcript

Sourced from John Kiriakou's on-record public statements. See his profile for the full body of his interviews, podcast appearances, and short-form video.