When Aldrich Ames was arrested in February 1994, he had been selling U.S. secrets to the Soviets and the Russians for almost 10 years. In that time, he exposed at least 12 double agents, and sold hundreds of classified documents to the KGB and its successor, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. He says he did it for the money, about $2.5 million. Ames's career with the CIA began in 1962. He worked undercover for three years in Turkey, and then married a colleague at the spy agency. They worked in Washington and New York during the 70's. Ames became friends with a representative of Pravda, the official Soviet newspaper, and began meeting regularly with Soviets assigned to the United Nations. Ames told the New York Times that this was when he began thinking about selling secrets to the KGB. An old friend of Ames paints a psychological profile of him as a likely risk to the CIA An underachiever, he was bright and successful in high school, but dropped out of college and advanced slowly on the job. A co-worker at the CIA remembers him as an incompetent goof-off. He had a drinking problem, an unhappy marriage, and no close friends. Ames transferred to Mexico City in 1981 without his wife. They later divorced. His supervisors evaluated him as dull, unsophisticated and lazy, but he was promoted to chief of the Soviet branch of the counterintelligence division. His job involved recruiting agents from other countries. One of his recruits was a Colombian cultural attachÄ named Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy. He began an affair with her, in violation of several CIA rules. In 1985, Ames gave a Soviet official the names of two KGB officers who were providing information to the FBI He received $50,000. A month later, he told the Soviets virtually everything he knew about CIA operations in Moscow, including the names of every Soviet intelligence official and military officer he knew was working for the United States. Most of them were executed. In an interview with the New York Times, Ames described some of these meetings. He says he occasionally flew to Bogota to meet with KGB officers in the middle of the night. He began drinking vodka before the session, and continue to drink while the officers asked him questions. He says he tried not to think about what he was doing, or the risks he was taking. He was so successful at blocking the thoughts, that he occasionally forgot to attend meetings. Later that year, Ames married Casas Dupuy. The KGB gave Ames a wedding present of $2 million, more than any U.S. spy is known to have received from the Soviets. Ames continued his spying in Rome, where he worked from 1986 to 1989. Every day during those three years, he met with an official from the Soviet Embassy. The meetings were easily explained as part of his recruiting efforts. At each meeting, he gave the official a bag containing stacks of classified documents, and received a box of Cuban cigars containing money. When Soviet double agents began to be arrested and killed, the CIA knew it had a traitor in its ranks. Investigators began making lists of everyone who had knowledge of the spies who were exposed. Ames was low on a list of 200 names, which was narrowed to 40 and then 20. Ames was transferred to a the less-sensitive counternarcotics unit at CIA headquarters near Washington in 1989. But he wouldn't become a serious target of investigation for another two years. Meanwhile, he continued spying for the Soviets. And he began spending some of his wealth. He paid cash for a $540,000 house in northern Virginia, and bought a $50,000 Jaguar, which he drove to work. Ames's salary was $70,000 at the most, and his lavish spending attracted some attention. In 1990, a supervisor wrote a memo that warned Ames was a potential traitor, and detailed his new, mysterious fortune. By the early '90's, Ames behaved almost as if he were asking to be caught. His old school friend speculated he was trying to prove himself smarter than his pursuers. But he told the New York Times he didn't think his lavish spending would fuel an investigation. He continued to spend freely, and began traveling abroad to meet his Russian contacts, without reporting the trips as required by CIA rules. The FBI finally became involved after Ames was spotted in Caracas in late 1992. Some federal officials have blamed infighting between the CIA and the FBI for the delay. There is plenty of history to suggest the agencies are rivals, though they officially deny it. Another theory is that the CIA became afraid of lawsuits and controversy after 1974. That's when the agency got rid of officials who had aggressively pursued suspected traitors for years, but turned up nothing. In 1993, the FBI bugged Ames's phone, searched his garbage and tapped into his computer at work and at home. Investigators learned about a system Ames used to communicate with the Russians, by marking public mailboxes with chalk. They listened to conversations between Ames and his wife, apparently discussing the signals. She scolds him about being late to relay the messages, and worries about his traveling with large sums of cash. Ames and his wife were arrested in February, 1994. As part of a plea-bargain, they pleaded guilty to espionage and tax fraud charges. He agreed to cooperate with investigators in exchange for leniency toward his wife. He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance for parole. She could be released after four and a half years, to be reunited with the couple's 5-year-old son. What Ames tells the CIA should clear up many mysteries, but probably not all of them. When the FBI raided Ames's office they found 154 secret and top secret reports on Russian intelligence, and another 100 classified reports in his home computer. He shouldn't have had access to them while working in counternarcotics. The CIA is now searching for another, perhaps more dangerous agent still active in the U.S. intelligence community.
