Aldrich Ames
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Aldrich Hazen Ames (born May 26, 1941) is a former Central Intelligence Agency counterintelligence officer and analyst, who, in 1994, was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.
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[edit] Early life & work
Ames was born in River Falls, Wisconsin to Rachel Aldrich and Carleton Cecil Ames.[1] Ames began working for the CIA in 1962 in a low-level job. For the next few years, he graduated from college and advanced through the ranks while working in the Records Integration Division of the Operations Directorate. In 1969, on his first assignment as a case officer, he was stationed in Ankara, Turkey, where his job was to target Soviet intelligence officers for recruitment. He first began spying for the Soviet Union in 1985, when he walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington to offer secrets for money.
Ames was assigned to the CIA's Europe Division / Counterintelligence branch where he was responsible for directing the analysis of Soviet intelligence operations. He had access to the identities of U.S. sources in the KGB and Soviet military. The information Ames provided led to the compromise of at least 100 U.S. intelligence operations and to the execution of at least 10 U.S. sources. He ultimately gave the Soviet Union the names of every American agent working in their country. The Soviets paid Ames approximately $2.5 million, allowing Ames and his Colombian-born wife, Rosario, to maintain a lifestyle beyond the means of a normal CIA officer. Ames, who struggled with alcoholism, had no ideological affinity for the USSR. Before he was caught, he was assigned the task of preparing the damage assessment of Jonathan Pollard's activities, and it is believed that he used the opportunity to attribute to Pollard the act of uncovering CIA agents and assets in the USSR.
[edit] Various betrayals
- Yurchenko was a KGB officer in the Fifth Department of the Directorate K. He defected to the US only to later repatriate to the Soviets. Ames was privy to all the information that Yurchenko gave to the CIA, and was able to report all the information Yurchenko handed over to the KGB which allowed easy cover-ups of lost information (Cherkashin 219).
- In the mid-1980's, Dmitri Polyakov was the highest ranking figure in Soviet military intelligence (GRU) giving information to the CIA. He was executed in 1988 after Ames exposed him. [2] Many agree he was the most valuable of the assets compromised by Ames. A CIA official said of him, "He didn't do this for money. He insisted on staying in place to help us."[3]
- Colonel Oleg Gordievsky was the head of the London rezidentura (residency). He spied for the SIS. Ames handed over information about Gordievsky that positively identified him as a traitor (Cherkashin 179-180), although the SIS later managed to extract him.
- Valery Martynov was a Line X officer at the Washington rezidentura. While a CIA mole was suspected to work at the Washington rezidentura, no one was able to pinpoint who it was. Ames handed over information that led to his arrest and execution (Cherkashin 187).
- Major Sergei Motorin was a Line PR officer at the Washington rezidentura. The FBI blackmailed him into spying for the US.[4] He was one of two moles at the rezidentura who was betrayed by Ames (Cherkashin 187). Motorin too was quickly executed after he was exposed. [5]
- Colonel Leonid Polishchuk was a Line KR agent in Nigeria. He too was betrayed by Ames. His arrest was attributed to a chance encounter where KGB agents observed a CIA agent loading a dead drop. After some time, Polishchuk was seen removing the contents (Cherkashin 191-192).
- Sergey Fedorenko was a nuclear arms expert assigned to the Soviet delegation to the United Nations. In 1987, Ames was assigned to handle him, and Fedorenko betrayed information about the Soviet missile program to Ames. The two men became good friends, hugging when Fedorenko was about to return to Moscow. “We had become close friends,” said Ames. “We trusted each other completely.”[6] Ames was initially hesitant to betray his friend, but soon after handing over the majority of the information decided that he would also betray Fedorenko because to "do a good job" for KGB he should really tell them every secret he knew. [7] Back in the USSR, Fedorenko used political connections to get himself out of trouble. Years later, Fedorenko meet his friend Ames for an emotional reunion over lunch and promise to move the US for good. Ames promised to help. Shortly after lunch, Ames betrayed him to the KGB for a second time. [8] Fedorenko escaped arrest, defected, and is currently living in Rhode Island[9]
[edit] CIA response
As early as 1985, the CIA's network of Soviet "assets" began disappearing at an alarming rate. The CIA noticed that something was very wrong, but were reluctant to admit that there was a mole in the agency. The CIA was the only Western intelligence agency that had never been infiltrated by the KGB. Initial investigations were far more focused on a communications breach caused by Soviet bugs or by a broken code. By 1990, the CIA was certain that there was a security breach, but could not find the source. Recruitment of new Soviet agents came almost to a halt.
The CIA was harshly criticized for not focusing on Ames sooner, given the dramatic increase in his standard of living. It has been alleged that investigation into the breach was discouraged in the late 1980s when the CIA was reeling from the Iran-Contra Affair and was desperate to avoid another major embarrassment. Another explanation is that the CIA was anxious to avoid a repeat of the internal turmoil generated by the brilliant, but extremely paranoid former ADDOCI James Angleton, whose obsessive conviction that the CIA was riddled with Soviet double agents adversely affected agency operations during the 1970s.
In 1986 and again in 1991, Ames passed two polygraph screening examinations while spying for the Soviet Union and Russia, respectively. Explanations for this include the possibility that Ames was in fact a sociopath and consequently immune to the trials of a polygraph. Ames himself admits that the techniques needed to defeat the polygraph are relatively easy to learn and perform and critics blame the CIA's over-reliance on the device to be harmful to national security.
Due to the inability of the CIA to uncover the leak, and the fear that the counter-intelligence division may not have been secure, the CIA turned to the FBI to investigate the matter. The FBI soon focused on Ames as one of the prime suspects, putting him under constant surveillance.
Markus Wolf, the retired director of the Stasi's foreign intelligence directorate, claimed in his memoirs that Gardner Hathaway, recently retired as CIA counterintelligence director but haunted by his failure to identify Ames, approached him in 1990 with an offer of cosmetic surgery, lavish compensation, and a new life in the United States if he were to defect and help the CIA identify the source of Ames's ongoing leak. Wolf also claimed to have declined the offer in the belief that he would have to compromise moles he had placed and that he had insufficient guarantees that the CIA would not betray him.
[edit] Arrest
In February of 1994, Ames was scheduled to fly to Moscow as part of his duties for the CIA, and the FBI feared that he would defect. This led to the arrest of Ames and his wife on February 21, 1994, by the FBI for providing highly classified information to the Soviet KGB and its successor organization, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. In the plea Ames made to the court, he said that he had compromised "virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me" and provided the USSR and Russia with a "huge quantity of information on United States foreign, defense and security policies."[10]
On February 22, 1994, Ames and his wife were charged by the United States Department of Justice with spying for the Soviet Union. Ames could have faced the death penalty, since his betrayal resulted in several CIA "assets" being killed. However, he received a sentence of life imprisonment, and his wife received a 5-year prison sentence for conspiracy to commit espionage and tax evasion as part of a plea-bargain by Ames. Rosario is now believed to be living in South America.
Although generally regarded as a traitor and in fact indicted for treason, Ames was never convicted of treason.
According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Ames is currently housed in the US Penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania. [10]
[edit] Movie
Ames' story is dramatized in the 1998 movie Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within, with Timothy Hutton as Ames.
[edit] In fiction
Ames was included as a character in the 1997 Frederick Forsyth novel Icon, in which several Soviet agents recruited by the United States were betrayed by him. [11]
[edit] References
- Cherkashin, Victor, and Gregory Feifer. Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer: the True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
[edit] Footnotes
[edit] Further reading
- Victor Cherkashin, Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer. The True Story of The Man Who recruited Robert Hanssen & Aldrich Ames, Basic, 2005, ISBN 0-465-00968-9
- Pete Earley, Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames ISBN 0-425-16712-7
- Online chapters of Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames by Pete Earley.
- Peter Maas, Killer Spy: The Inside Story of the FBI's Pursuit and Capture of Aldrich Ames, America's Deadliest Spy, Warner, 1995, ISBN 0-446-51973-1
- David Wise, Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million, HarperCollins, 1995, ISBN 0060171987
- U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, "A Review of the FBI's Performance in Uncovering the Espionage Activities of Aldrich Hazen Ames - Unclassified Executive Summary (April 1997)" Executive Summary online
- "Famous Cases: Aldrich Hazen Ames", Federal Bureau of Investigation (Mar. 27, 2005) - A short description of Ames' spying career
- Rationalizing treason: An interview with Aldrich Ames, CNN Cold War Series (1998) - Aldrich Ames in his own words
- CIA Traitor Aldrich Ames - A lengthy description of Ames' spying career
- Victims of Aldrich Ames
