Aldrich Ames, the most damaging double agent in US history

By: Myles Burke / BBC
Translation: Telegrafi.com

In 1985, Soviet agents working for the CIA suddenly disappeared. One by one, these Western intelligence sources were captured by the Soviet security service, the KGB, interrogated, and very often executed.

Oleg Gordievsky was one of these double agents. As the KGB station chief in London, he had worked secretly for years for Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6. But one day he found himself in Moscow, drugged, exhausted after five hours of interrogation, and facing the real possibility of death by firing squad. Gordievsky escaped after MI6 managed to smuggle him out of the Soviet Union in the trunk of a car.

Gordievsky then tried to figure out who had betrayed him. "For almost nine years I thought about who that person was, who the source was who betrayed me, and I had no answer," he told the BBC's Tom Mangold in an interview for Newsnight on February 28, 1994. Two months later, Gordievsky would get his answer when CIA veteran Aldrich Ames appeared in a US courtroom and admitted to having compromised “almost all the Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services that I knew.”

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On April 28, 1994, Ames admitted to having uncovered the identities of more than 30 agents spying for the West, and to having compromised over 100 covert operations. Known to the KGB by the codename Kolokol (“The Bell”), Ames’ betrayal led to the execution of at least 10 CIA collaborators, including General Dmitri Polyakov, a senior Soviet military intelligence official who had been providing information to the West for more than 20 years. Ames, the most destructive KGB spy in U.S. history, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Like the revelation in the 60s that Kim Philby was a Soviet spy that shook the British establishment, “now it was Washington’s turn to confront the extent of the damage caused by Ames,” Mangold said in 1994.

It was Ames’s role as head of the Soviet counterintelligence department in the CIA that enabled him to do so much damage. He had almost unlimited access to classified information on US covert operations against the Soviet Union and, more importantly, to the identities of agents in the field. His position also meant that he could be present at interrogations conducted by other Western intelligence services. This is how Britain’s most valuable spy, Gordievsky – a KGB colonel who provided vital information to the two British services, MI6 and MI5 – came into contact with him. These meetings created an extraordinary situation, where, as Mangold put it, “the KGB’s top spy was being interrogated by the KGB’s top spy in the CIA.”

“The Americans were very precise and really good at interrogation,” Gordievsky said. “I was enthusiastic. I liked the Americans. I wanted to share my knowledge with them, and now I understand that [Ames] was there. Which means that everything, all the new answers to my information, he probably passed on to the KGB.”

Ames was exposed to the world of espionage at a young age. His father was a CIA analyst and helped his son secure a job with the agency after he dropped out of college. But Ames's later decision to betray the intelligence service was motivated less by ideological convictions and more by the need for money.

Ames initially showed potential as a counterintelligence officer. He was first posted with his wife, Nancy Segebarth—also a CIA agent—to Turkey in the late 60s, where he was tasked with recruiting foreign agents. But by 1972, his superiors had returned him to CIA headquarters, feeling he was not suited for field work. After returning to the United States, he studied Russian and was tasked with planning operations against Soviet officials.

His father's career in the CIA had been hampered by alcohol problems, and Ames himself began to struggle with excessive drinking. In 1972, he was caught by another agent drunk and in a compromising situation with another CIA employee. The situation was further exacerbated by his neglectful attitude towards work – in 1976, he left a briefcase full of classified documents on a subway train.

In an effort to get his career back on track, Ames accepted a second assignment abroad, to Mexico City in 1981, while his wife remained in New York. But his behavior and continued heavy drinking made him a poor CIA officer there. In 1981, he was involved in a traffic accident in Mexico City and was so drunk that he was unable to answer police questions or recognize a U.S. Embassy official who had come to his aid. After a heated, abusive, and drunken argument with a Cuban official during a diplomatic reception at the Embassy, ​​his superior recommended that the CIA evaluate him for alcoholism upon his return to the United States.

Ames also continued to have extramarital affairs, one of which would prove to be a turning point in his life. In late 1982, he began a relationship with a Colombian cultural attaché recruited to work for the CIA, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy. Their relationship became increasingly serious, until Ames decided to divorce his first wife, marry Rosario, and bring her with him to the United States.

Despite his lackluster performance at the CIA, Ames continued to rise in his career. Upon returning to Agency headquarters in 1983, he was appointed chief of the counterintelligence branch for Soviet operations, giving him extensive access to sensitive information on the CIA's covert activities.

Ames had agreed, as part of his divorce settlement with Nancy, to pay off the debts they had incurred as a couple, as well as a monthly payment for her. Added to this were the expensive tastes of his new wife, Rosario—her passion for shopping and frequent phone calls to her family in Colombia. Ames' financial problems spiraled out of control. He would later tell Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini that it was the mounting debts that led him to consider selling the secrets he held. "I felt a lot of financial pressure, which, in retrospect, was something I reacted to in a reckless way," Ames said.

"It was for money and I don't believe he ever seriously tried to make people believe it was for any other reason," he said. BBC Witness History in 2015, FBI agent Leslie G. Wiser, involved in the investigation that led to Ames' arrest.

On April 16, 1985, after a few drinks to build up his courage, Aldrich Ames walked straight into the Russian Embassy in Washington. Upon entering, he handed the receptionist an envelope containing the names of several double agents, documents showing his credentials as a CIA insider, and a note demanding $50. He later claimed in a Senate report that he initially believed this would be the only deal to get him out of the financial hole, but he soon realized that he had “crossed a line and there was no going back.”

For the next nine years, Ames was paid to provide the KGB with a vast amount of top-secret information. He would take classified documents—describing everything from eavesdropping devices connected to the Moscow space center to sophisticated technologies that counted the nuclear warheads of Soviet missiles—and wrap them in plastic bags and simply take them out of the CIA building. Since his role involved official meetings with Russian diplomats, he could often meet with his liaison agents without arousing suspicion. He would also leave packages of classified documents in designated secret locations called dead drops.

“If he was going to do a [dead drop], he would put, for example, a chalk mark on a mailbox beforehand, and the Russians would see that mark and know that the documents had been delivered,” Wiser said. “Later, when they got the documents, they would go and erase the chalk mark. That way, he knew that the delivery had been made safely and successfully.”

It so happened that through Ames' leaks of classified information, the KGB identified almost all of the CIA's spies in the Soviet Union, effectively destroying American covert operations there. "I am not aware of any other spy or 'tracker' [mole] in the United States who has caused such a huge loss of human life in terms of intelligence resources," Wiser said. The sudden disappearance of so many CIA sources raised alarm and launched a search for the spy within the Agency in 1986, but Ames managed to remain invisible for most of the decade.

And he was handsomely rewarded for his betrayal—taking about $2.5 million from the Soviet Union. Ames made little effort to hide his newfound wealth. Although he had never earned more than $70 a year, he bought a new house worth $540 in cash, spent tens of thousands more on home improvements, and bought a car. JaguarIt was precisely his extravagant lifestyle and spending that made him a target and led to his arrest in 1994 by the FBI team led by Leslie G. Wiser.

After being arrested by the FBI, Ames cooperated with authorities. He confessed to the extent of his espionage activities in exchange for a plea bargain that secured a lighter sentence for Rosario, who admitted to knowing about the money and his meetings with the Soviets. She was released after five years. Ames, the highest-ranking CIA officer ever exposed as a double agent, continues to serve a life sentence in a U.S. federal prison in Terra Hot, Indiana.

To this day, Ames has shown little remorse for his actions or the deaths they caused. “He had a very high opinion of himself,” Wiser said of Ames. “He regrets getting caught. He doesn’t regret being a spy.” /Telegraph/