Studying bank deposits, Sandra Grimes found a deadly CIA traitor

In the middle of 1985, it seemed that every month a new American asset providing information on the Soviets had disappeared.

A network that took years of spycraft to develop was evaporating through arrests and executions. At least eight Soviet informants were killed. No one knew what was going on. The intelligence community thought their communications were compromised. But they also feared the worst: a traitor.

The deaths remained a mystery for years until a CIA counterintelligence analyst named Sandra “Sandy” Grimes began investigating a colleague’s finances. Ms. Grimes discovered that Aldrich Ames, a 51-year-old counterintelligence officer she used to carpool with, was working for the Soviets. Ames, who was later convicted of espionage, is considered the most damaging double agent in CIA history.

Ms. Grimes died July 25 at her home in Great Falls, Virginia. She was 79. The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, which she was diagnosed with last year, said her daughter Tracy Hobiena.

Ms. Grimes spent the last years of her nearly three decades at the agency determining what happened to the Soviets who risked everything on behalf of the United States.

In early 1991, she had told her boss she intended to retire. But her plans changed when her supervisor asked her to stay on for one more assignment: help a colleague, Jeanne Vertefeuille, figure out why so many of the CIA’s Russian informants had been wiped out.

“Without hesitation I replied that he made me the only offer I could have never refused,” Ms. Grimes wrote in “Circle of Treason,” an account of the Ames case she co-authored with Vertefeuille. “Our dead sources deserved advocates.”

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Spy vs. spy

Sandra Joyce Venable was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, on Aug. 10, 1945, three weeks before the end of World War II. Her father was an MIT-trained engineer, and her mother had joined the war effort by serving in the Women’s Army Corps.

The couple met in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, while working on the Manhattan Project. They later moved the family to Los Alamos, New Mexico — the birthplace of the atomic bomb — and the Denver suburbs.

Ms. Grimes didn’t share her father’s love of science, electing to avoid a high school physics course by taking a Russian-language class instead. She majored in Russian at the University of Washington, where she decided to meet with a visiting CIA recruiter after running into an ex-boyfriend who told her, “You would make a perfect spy.”

Weeks after graduating in 1967, she joined the CIA, becoming one of the agency’s few female employees at that time.

During an internal job interview in 1970, a male senior officer asked about her plans for motherhood, adding that her career would be over if she decided to have children. “I responded by inquiring as to his plans for additional children,” she recalled. The interview ended without further comment by either, but she got the promotion.

Ms. Grimes specialized in Soviet intelligence issues, organizing and protecting assets funneling information to the U.S.

For years, she worked under Vertefeuille, who in 1986 was tasked with looking into why so many Soviet agents had disappeared. Around the same time, Ms. Grimes was assigned to help keep the remaining ones alive. The two began swapping information and eventually became members of a small team hunting the mole.

Ames came under suspicion in 1989, when the team learned that he had suddenly acquired a new Jaguar sports car and a half-million-dollar home in Arlington, Virginia. The tip was set aside, however, as the mole hunters were distracted by pressing developments on another case.

In 1992, Ms. Grimes was digging into Ames’s finances and personal life — going over his key card swipes, bank statements, appointments — when she began to notice a pattern. Ames had lunch with a Soviet diplomat one day, then deposited $9,000 the next. And so it went, with another $5,000 after a meeting and another $8,500 after a lunch.

Ms. Grimes recalled that she zipped to her boss and said: “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell what is going on here. Rick is a goddamn Russian spy.”

The FBI soon took over the investigation, surveilling Ames to see what else his connection to the Russians could tell them, and going so far as to tap his phone at the CIA.

Ames was arrested on Presidents Day 1994, after nearly a decade of spying for the Soviets, and soon pleaded guilty to espionage charges. He was believed to have received about $2.5 million from Moscow, according to a report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, and is serving a life sentence in prison without the possibility of parole.

His wife, Colombian native Maria del Rosario Casas Ames, was sentenced in October 1994 to a five-year prison term — despite a tearful plea for mercy — for assisting him.

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The mom, the spy

Hobiena said it was only in college that she first learned details about her mother’s work, while watching Ms. Grimes interviewed by Ted Koppel on ABC’s “Nightline.”

“She lived two lives,” Hobiena said in a phone interview. “It was a completely secret life, so she couldn’t come home and mourn” the loss of the Russian informants.

In 2003, a decade after she retired from the CIA, Ms. Grimes began working on a memoir, “Circle of Treason,” with Vertefeuille. The book was adapted into a 2014 ABC miniseries, “The Assets,” starring Jodie Whittaker as Ms. Grimes. Harriet Walter played Vertefeuille, who died of cancer in 2012.

During a panel discussion at the International Spy Museum in Washington, Ms. Grimes said that the show got almost everything right. One notable slipup: In one scene, Whittaker makes pancakes for her family before heading to work.

“Me? Flipping pancakes like that?” Ms. Grimes laughed. “Noooo.”

Survivors include her husband of 56 years, Gary Grimes, an IT executive; two daughters, Hobiena and Kelly Cooper; two sisters; and four grandchildren.

Hobiena said it wasn’t easy for her and her sister to be boundary-pushing teenage girls when their mother was secretly a CIA mole hunter.

She remembered wanting to stay late at school with a friend to hang around the guys on the football team, but she knew her parents wouldn’t go for that. So, like many suburban teens before her, she lied and said she was out studying. She got busted by Mom.

And when her sister left the house one day with a cuter outfit stashed and a plan to change at a neighbor’s house, Mom knew again.

“My mom was a spy,” Hobiena said drily. “We got away with nothing.”