Aldrich Hazen Ames (born May 26, 1941) is a former Central Intelligence Agency counter-intelligence officer and analyst, who, in 1994, was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and later Russia.
Ames was born in River Falls, Wisconsin, to Rachel Aldrich and Carleton Cecil Ames. He attended high school at McLean High School in McLean, VA. Ames began working for the CIA in 1962 in a low-level job intended for children of CIA agents. Ames later stated he did not originally plan career employment with the CIA, seeing his low level work as a “stop gap” measure to help put himself through school, but over time became fascinated by CIA work. Over the next few years, he graduated from college and advanced through the ranks while working in the Records Integration Division of the Operations Directorate. In 1969 Ames married fellow CIA coworker Nancy Segebarth, from whom he divorced in 1984, when he married Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, a Colombia born, former cultural attaché in the Colombian Embassy in Mexico and CIA informant.
In 1969, on his first assignment as a case officer, he was stationed in Ankara, Turkey, where his job was to target Soviet intelligence officers for recruitment. He infiltrated the Communist DEV-GENÇ organization through the roommate of student activist Deniz Gezmiş, who was later executed. In exchange for $75, he requested the names of the DEV-GENÇ members Gezmis knew, and the details of their activities.
Ames was assigned to the CIA’s Europe Division/Counterintelligence branch, where he was responsible for directing the analysis of Soviet intelligence operations. He had access to the identities of U.S. sources in the KGB and Soviet military. The information Ames provided led to the compromise of at least 100 U.S. intelligence operations and to the execution of at least 10 U.S. sources. He ultimately gave the Soviet government the names of every American agent working in their country.
Altogether, the Soviets paid Ames approximately $4.6 million for his services, allowing Ames to maintain a lifestyle well beyond the means of a normal CIA officer.
As early as 1985, the CIA’s network of Soviet-bloc agents began disappearing at an alarming rate. The CIA noticed that something was very wrong, but was reluctant to admit that there was a mole in the agency. Initial investigations were far more focused on a communications breach caused by Soviet bugs or by a broken code. By 1990, the CIA was certain that there was a mole, but could not find the source. Recruitment of new Soviet agents came almost to a halt.
The CIA was harshly criticized for not focusing on Ames sooner, given the dramatic increase in his standard of living. One of Ames’s co-workers (also a friend of his wife) noted that Mrs Ames was able to make payment in full for drapes in their house, even though that co-worker (in similar circumstances) was obliged to pay in installments. Despite Ames’s official salary of $60,000 USD he was able to afford
- A $540,000 house in Arlington, Virginia, paid with a personal check;
- A $60,000 Jaguar car;
- Monthly phone bills exceeding $6,000, mostly calls by Ames’s wife to her family in Bogotá, Colombia;
- Tailored suits replacing Ames’s former ‘bargain basement’ clothes, conspicuously better than those of his CIA colleagues;
- A credit score far in excess of his income—Ames maintained premium credit cards whose minimum monthly payment exceeded his monthly salary.[citation needed]
It has been alleged that investigation into the breach was discouraged in the late 1980s, when the CIA was reeling from the Iran-Contra Affair and was desperate to avoid another major embarrassment. Another explanation is that the CIA was anxious to avoid a repeat of the internal turmoil generated by the brilliant, but extremely paranoid, former ADDOCI (CIA’s Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counter-Intelligence) James Angleton, whose obsessive conviction that the CIA was riddled with Soviet double agents adversely affected agency operations during the 1970s.
In 1986 and again in 1991, Ames passed two polygraph screening examinations while spying for the Soviet Union and Russia, respectively. Explanations for this include the possibility that Ames was in fact a sociopath and consequently immune to the polygraph test, or had learned or been trained how to defeat the “lie detector”. Ames himself admits that the techniques needed to defeat the polygraph are relatively easy to learn and perform. Critics claim that the CIA’s over-reliance on the device is harmful to national security.
Due to the inability of the CIA to uncover the leak and the fear that the counter-intelligence division may not have been secure, the CIA turned to the FBI to investigate the matter. The FBI soon focused on Ames as one of the prime suspects and put him under constant surveillance.
Markus Wolf, the retired director of the Stasi’s foreign intelligence directorate, claimed in his memoirs that Gardner Hathaway, recently retired as CIA counterintelligence director but haunted by his failure to identify Ames, approached him in 1990 with an offer of cosmetic surgery, lavish compensation, and a new life in the United States if he were to defect and help the CIA identify the source of Ames’s ongoing leak. Wolf also claimed to have declined the offer in the belief that he would have to compromise moles he had placed and that he had insufficient guarantees that the CIA would not betray him.
In February 1994, Ames was scheduled to fly to Moscow as part of his duties for the CIA and the FBI feared that he would defect. The FBI arrested Ames and his wife on February 21, 1994 for providing highly classified information to the Soviet KGB and its successor organization, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. In the plea Ames made to the court, he said that he had compromised “virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me” and provided the USSR and Russia with a “huge quantity of information on United States foreign, defense and security policies.”
On February 22, 1994, Ames and his wife were formally charged by the United States Department of Justice with spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. Ames could have faced the death penalty, since his betrayal had resulted in several CIA “assets” being killed. However, he received a sentence of life imprisonment, and his wife received a 5-year prison sentence for conspiracy to commit espionage and tax evasion as part of a plea-bargain by Ames. Upon her release from prison, Rosario was deported to South America.
Ames is federal prisoner #40087-083 and is currently housed in the high security US Penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania.
