Aldrich Ames, most damaging CIA traitor in agency history, dies at 84
Aldrich H. Ames, the CIA officer whose spying for Moscow was the most damaging breach in the agency’s history, reportedly causing the deaths of at least 10 recruited CIA or allied intelligence agents, died Jan. 5 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland. He was 84.
His death was recorded in the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ inmate database, which did not say how he died, and confirmed by a spokesman for the agency.
“Financial troubles, immediate and continuing,” Mr. Ames said matter-of-factly, were what led him to spy for the Soviet Union and to remain a double agent for nine years, until the moment of his arrest in February 1994. He had continued to spy for Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991.
But money, he said, was not the only reason he could justify to himself what became the Central Intelligence Agency’s worst security loss in its then-47-year history.
When Mr. Ames was interviewed by The Washington Post at the jail in Alexandria, Virginia, nine weeks after his arrest, he calmly attributed his willingness to undertake what prosecutors described as “a crime that caused people to die” to a mentality shaped long before he began his work for the Soviets.
He had been in the spy and counterspy business for 31 years, usually disguised as a State Department official while working undercover as a CIA operative. That dual existence had caused him to compartmentalize his thinking, said Mr. Ames, who would plead guilty in court the next day.
Asked how he could sell sensitive secrets, given his loyalty oaths and his feelings about his country and his family, Mr. Ames replied, “I tend to put some of these things in separate boxes, and compartment feelings and thoughts.”
He added, “I felt at least the way I’m selling these guys down the river, I’m exposing myself to the same fate.”
Mr. Ames turned over to Moscow the names of recruited Soviet and Warsaw Pact agents and information about hundreds of intelligence operations. In return, he received more than $1 million in cash and was promised at least another $1 million and property in Russia.
Russian officials told author Pete Earley, who wrote a book about Mr. Ames, that the money Moscow owed Mr. Ames would be delivered to his wife and son in some way.
On April 28, 1994, in front of a packed courtroom that included his weeping wife, Rosario, and some former CIA colleagues, Mr. Ames said he “betrayed a serious trust,” but then he tried to play down the damage caused by what he had done as a double agent.
“These spy wars,” Mr. Ames said dryly, “are a sideshow which have had no real impact on our significant security interests over the years.”
In his plea agreement, Mr. Ames admitted to giving his KGB handler the names of “virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me” along with a “huge quantity of information on United States foreign, defense and security policies.”
In a typically ironic turn of phrase, Mr. Ames added: “For those persons in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere who may have suffered from my actions, I have the deepest sympathy, even empathy. We made similar choices and suffer similar consequences.”
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A certain pride
Mr. Ames clearly took pride in what he offered the Soviets. During the interview the day before his court appearance, he said that, in 1985, when he started selling secrets, he was “one of the most knowledgeable people in the intelligence community on the Russian intelligence service. And my access to information and my knowledge of the Soviets was such that I could get virtually anything I wanted.”
“There was this strange transfer of loyalties,” he said. “It wasn’t to the Soviet system, which I believe was a beastly, inhuman, nasty regime.” Instead, he suggested that he had become disillusioned with U.S. intelligence and had shifted his loyalty to a way of life and a world he considered above the petty concerns of governments.
At the time, Mr. Ames was in the middle of a divorce from his first wife, the former Nancy Segebarth, another CIA officer, and had fallen in love with Maria del Rosario Casas. They met in Mexico City, where she worked in the Colombian Embassy and he was meeting regularly with a KGB officer as they attempted to recruit each other.
While in Washington in April 1985, he walked into the Soviet Embassy and offered up the names of two CIA-recruited agents, for which he was later given $50,000. Some months after that, he followed up with the names of all the Soviet and Warsaw Pact agents he knew the CIA and FBI had recruited, without immediately asking for money. The Soviets, intrigued, told him that he would eventually receive up to $2 million.
A year later, the CIA transferred him to Rome, where he continued to hand over documents on a regular basis. Back in Washington in 1989, he began making document transfers, using hiding places in obscure areas, and signals left on mailboxes and utility poles.
Although the CIA and FBI were aware that secrets were being stolen — as their Russian agents began to disappear — it took years to focus on Mr. Ames. His lifestyle in the Washington area, a Jaguar and a $540,000 house bought for cash in Virginia, had raised no questions.
Mr. Ames was 52 when he was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole. He pleaded guilty as part of an agreement that provided leniency to his then-41-year-old wife, Rosario, who had been charged as a participant in the spying.
At the time, their son, Paul, was 5 and had gone to live with his grandmother in Colombia. Rosario was sentenced to five years and three months in prison, but she was released after four years, in part so she could return to her home in Bogotá and to her son.
At the Allenwood, Pennsylvania, maximum-security prison, Mr. Ames studied law in the prison library and filed several lawsuits. In 1998, he went before a federal judge in Pennsylvania to fight a $404,392 tax bill from the IRS, which was seeking back taxes and penalties on the more than $1 million he received from Moscow for espionage between 1989 and 1992. He lost the case.
In prison, Mr. Ames met with Robert Benedetti, a film producer who was an acquaintance from their time together at the University of Chicago. Benedetti interviewed Mr. Ames in prison, and the result was a 1998 movie that aired on the Showtime cable network: “Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within,” with Timothy Hutton as Mr. Ames.
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Parents were teachers
Aldrich Hazen Ames was born in River Falls, Wisconsin, on May 26, 1941. His father, Carleton, was a professor at what is now the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. His mother, the former Rachel Aldrich, taught English at the local high school.
In 1952, the family moved to the Virginia suburbs, and his father went to work for the CIA’s clandestine service. Carleton Ames retired in 1967 at age 62.
Meanwhile, in 1957, young “Rick” Ames got a summer job at the CIA marking classified documents for filing after his sophomore year at McLean High School. He returned to the CIA job the following two summers before going to the University of Chicago to major in drama.
He dropped out of college, worked in Chicago for a year and then returned to the Washington area and a clerk-typist job at the CIA. He spent five years getting a degree from George Washington University, and, in 1967, he was accepted in the CIA Career Trainee Program, which led to his becoming a CIA case officer.
Despite repeated reports of a drinking problem, he was assigned in the early 1990s to the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group, where he had access to the names of double agent operations.
In September 2015, some 170 letters that Mr. Ames sent to his sister Nancy describing his 11 years in Allenwood were put up for auction. In them, according to a sales brochure, Mr. Ames describes “plans for legal appeals with his attorney, reports on a serious prison guard threat, arranges for newspaper and television interviews, [and] reveals a lengthy and very cultivated accounting of the books and magazines he reads in prison.”
The auction house put an estimated price on the hundreds of handwritten pages at $10,000 to $12,000. A subsequent news column reported that they sold for $4,000.
Over the years, Mr. Ames kept up with events that interested him. In 2000, he sent a handwritten letter to Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, commenting on Aftergood’s article on polygraphs in Science magazine.
Mr. Ames began caustically, “Having had considerable experience with the polygraph (well beyond that which you referred to),” and went on to critique the practice and practitioners, saying, “Like most junk science that just won’t die (graphology, astrology and homeopathy come to mind), because of the usefulness or profit their practitioners enjoy, the polygraph stays with us.”
Years earlier, he had beaten the polygraphers, and he did not want anyone to forget that.
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• Pincus, a former Washington Post reporter covering national security issues, reported on the Ames case as it unfolded.