ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- Rosario Ames turned from the stand where she had just admitted her role in the worst spy case in U.S. history, fingering her jail-issued rosary, her lips quivering.
Her husband, Aldrich Ames, 52, looked to her, smiling. She ignored him, staring straight ahead. Then the tears fell.
Moments later, Aldrich Ames pleaded guilty to espionage conspiracy and tax fraud. He'll spend the rest of his life in prison for selling CIA secrets to the Soviet Union and Russia.
His wife's fate rests in the veteran CIA official's ability to please FBI counterintelligence agents trying to determine what damage Ames caused in the past nine years.
If they like what he says, she'll get five years in prison, then be released to raise their son, Paul, 5, now living with her family in Colombia.
If they decide he isn't cooperating, Rosario Ames, 42, can be sentenced to up to 15 years.
"That's the carrot they're holding out there," says Aldrich Ames' lawyer, Plato Cacheris. "I think the government will find in his debriefings he will be fully candid."
The first tale the spy told - in a courtroom apology - was one of manipulation and blackmail in his own home.
When his wife accidentally learned in 1992 that their vast wealth came from Moscow - not investments as he had claimed - it "was devastating to her," Ames says.
But by blaming her extravagant spending for his deadly spying, Ames says, he undermined "her own sense of integrity, making her even more vulnerable to my blackmail."
Rosario Ames didn't speak at the arraignment, other than to meekly answer questions from Judge Claude Hilton.
Her lawyer, William Cummings, says that by the time she learned of the spying, Rosario Ames was accustomed to her affluent lifestyle in Arlington, Va., a Washington suburb.
"It was difficult for her to escape," says Cummings. "Her choice at that time was to leave America. She chose to stay."
Ames likened his criminal offenses to those of "a corrupt government official receiving a bribe or a stock speculator acting on inside information.
"I do regret and feel shame for this betrayal of trust, done for the basest of motives."
Prosecutor Mark Hulkower says as many as a dozen Soviets working for the CIA were killed, imprisoned or "simply vanished" after Ames sold their names. "Mr. Ames caused the death of these people just as surely as if he'd pulled the trigger."
U.S. Attorney Helen Fahey says "what he did is trade people's lives for $ 2.5 million."
Ames - code-named "Kolokol," or "K" by Soviet officials - says his spying started in April 1985 as a "game."
He sold names of Soviets who appeared to be cooperating with the CIA - although he believed they were really loyal to the KGB, so "therefore I could cause them no harm" - for $ 50,000.
A few months later, he volunteered all the Soviet agents of the CIA and other American foreign services he knew.
The KGB's response - "$ 2 million in gratitude" - was, he says, an "enduring surprise."
