Aldrich Ames

Aldrich Hazen Ames (born May 26, 1941) was a CIA officer in the Soviet and East European Division who from April 1985 until his arrest in February 1994 provided KGB intelligence with the identities of CIA and FBI sources inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in exchange for approximately $2.7 million - the largest known cash payment to an American intelligence traitor in history. At least ten CIA sources were executed as a result of Ames's disclosures. His nine years of undetected operation inside CIA's most sensitive Soviet operations unit, despite mounting evidence of a penetration, is the most consequential intelligence failure in CIA history. His arrest confirmed what James Angleton had spent two decades warning about - that the CIA had been penetrated at a significant level by Soviet intelligence - while simultaneously demonstrating that Angleton's mole hunt had targeted entirely the wrong people.¹

Background and CIA Career

Ames grew up in Wisconsin and Virginia, son of Carleton Ames, a CIA officer. He joined the CIA in 1962, following his father into the agency. His career trajectory was unremarkable: he served in Turkey, Mexico City, and New York in various Soviet-related capacities, developing expertise in Soviet intelligence tradecraft but advancing slowly. Colleagues described him as intelligent but undisciplined, a heavy drinker who had difficulty managing administrative responsibilities. Despite periodic poor performance reviews, the CIA retained him.

In 1981, Ames was assigned to a CIA counterintelligence position handling Soviet sources - ironically, the exact role in which a Soviet penetration agent would have maximum damage potential. He married Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, a Colombian national he had recruited as a CIA informant. Her expensive tastes created financial pressure he used to justify his subsequent decisions.¹

The Decision to Betray

On April 16, 1985, Ames walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. and handed over a package identifying three Soviet intelligence officers the CIA had recruited as sources, in exchange for $50,000 in cash. This initial meeting was intended, Ames later stated, as a one-time transaction to resolve his financial difficulties. Within weeks he had decided to continue.

In June 1985, Ames provided the KGB with the names of virtually every CIA and FBI asset inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that he was aware of - a catastrophic "big dump" of intelligence that the KGB had never received in a single transaction. Among those he identified were officers the CIA had recruited at great expense and risk over years. The KGB received this material and spent the following months quietly rolling up the compromised assets, arresting them in waves timed to prevent the pattern from being attributed to a single source.¹

Executions and the Damage Assessment

At least ten CIA sources executed as a result of Ames's disclosures have been publicly identified. Among the most significant:

General Dmitri Polyakov (codenamed TOPHAT and ROAM), a GRU general who had been providing intelligence to the CIA and FBI since 1961 - by some assessments the most valuable American penetration of Soviet military intelligence ever achieved. Polyakov was arrested in 1986 and executed in 1988.

Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB's London resident who had been working for British intelligence since 1974, was not exposed by Ames but was compromised through a related channel. He was recalled to Moscow in 1985, placed under surveillance, and narrowly escaped through a British extraction operation.

Colonel Sergei Motorin and Colonel Valery Martynov, both KGB officers recruited by the FBI in Washington, D.C., were recalled to Moscow and executed. Their recruiters inside CIA knew immediately that something had gone wrong but did not immediately understand that a penetration was responsible.¹

The Nine Years of Missed Warning Signs

From 1986 onward, the CIA began losing sources at a rate that was impossible to explain by operational security failures, bad luck, or the normal attrition of human intelligence assets. A 1986 "mole hunt" task force was established and then allowed to stagnate. Warning signs about Ames accumulated:

He purchased a $540,000 house in Arlington, Virginia in 1989, for cash, on a CIA salary of approximately $70,000 per year. He drove expensive cars and took elaborate overseas vacations. His bank records, had anyone examined them, showed regular cash deposits. His wife, separately monitored by FBI counter-intelligence on an unrelated matter, was observed making statements consistent with awareness of his espionage.

CIA counterintelligence chief Paul Redmond and analyst Diana Worthen identified Ames as a prime suspect as early as 1991. The FBI was not formally brought in until 1993. FBI agents placed him under surveillance, observed a signal indicating a dead drop meeting with his KGB handlers, and built the evidentiary case needed for arrest.¹

Arrest and Conviction

On February 21, 1994, FBI agents arrested Ames at his Arlington home as he left for CIA headquarters. Maria Casas Ames was arrested simultaneously. The arrests were timed to coincide with a planned trip to Moscow that the FBI feared he might not return from.

Ames pleaded guilty to espionage and tax fraud charges on April 28, 1994. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Maria Ames pleaded guilty to tax fraud and conspiracy and was sentenced to 63 months in federal prison. As part of his plea agreement, Ames provided a full debriefing of his activities and the extent of the damage - though subsequent assessments found that even his debriefing was incomplete in places.

The damage assessment concluded he had compromised more than 100 intelligence operations and had been paid $2,706,000 over nine years - approximately $300,000 per year, with a substantial balance remaining in a KGB-held account that Russia returned as a good-faith gesture.²