|
|
|
|
Aldrich Ames
|
| |
|
| |
Aldrich Hazen Ames (born May 26 1941) is a former Central Intelligence Agency counter-intelligence officer and analyst, who, in 1994, was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and later Russia.
was born in River Falls, Wisconsin to Rachel Aldrich and Carleton Cecil Ames.
Discussion
Ask a question about 'Aldrich Ames' Start a new discussion about 'Aldrich Ames' Answer questions from other users |
Encyclopedia
Aldrich Hazen Ames (born May 26 1941) is a former Central Intelligence Agency counter-intelligence officer and analyst, who, in 1994, was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and later Russia.
Early life and work
Ames was born in River Falls, Wisconsin to Rachel Aldrich and Carleton Cecil Ames. He attended high school at McLean High School in McLean, VA. Ames began working for the CIA in 1962 in a low-level job intended for children of CIA agents. Ames later stated he did not originally plan career employment with the CIA, seeing his low level work as a "stop gap" measure to help put himself through school, but over time became fascinated by CIA work. Over 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 infiltrated the Communist DEV-GENÇ organization through the roommate of student activist Deniz Gezmis, who was later executed. In exchange for $75, he requested the names of the DEV-GENÇ members she knew, and the details of their activities.
While he had some interesting assignments, including the handling of Soviet Diplomat Aleksandr Dmitrievich Ogorodnik, his personal life was in shambles. He frequently fought with his first wife, Nancy, and would often go out binge drinking to get away from her. When assigned to the US Embassy to Mexico in 1983, he committed adultery with Rosario Dupuy, who at the time was an employee of the Colombian Embassy to Mexico. Soon after his return to the US following that assignment, he began divorce proceedings against Nancy. He also began cohabitation and eventually married Rosario, who was spending much of his money shopping. The financial pressure of his divorce as well as Rosario's lavish lifestyle demands pushed Ames into coming up with a method to augment his finances. He began spying for the Soviet Union during 1985, when he walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington in order 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 government the names of every American agent working in their country. Altogether, the Soviets paid Ames approximately $4.6 million for his services, allowing Ames to maintain a lifestyle well beyond the means of a normal CIA officer.
With the money he earned from spying for the USSR he bought a new Jaguar, jewelry, designer clothing, and a house in the Northern Virginia suburbs valued at $500,000 (paid for in cash). Ames did not have an ideological affinity for the USSR; he was interested only in gaining more money. Before he was caught, he was assigned the task of preparing the damage assessment of Jonathan Pollard's activities, and defenders of Pollard believe that he used the opportunity to attribute to Pollard the act of uncovering CIA agents and assets in the USSR. Ames and his wife liquidated about $2.5 million of the money the Soviets paid him for their personal use, with the Soviets withholding the remaining $2.1 million in a Russian bank account to be utilized once Ames retired from his spying.
Various betrayals of CIA sources
- Vitaly 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. Yurchenko returned to the Soviet Union in 1985 and was re-assigned to a desk job within the FCD, a reward for helping to keep Ames' spying a secret.
- In the mid-1980s, 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. Many agree he was the most valuable of the assets compromised by Ames. A CIA official said of Polyakov, "He didn't do this for money. He insisted on staying in place to help us."
- 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, although the British 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.
- Major Sergei Motorin was a Line PR officer at the Washington rezidentura. The FBI blackmailed him into spying for the US. He was one of two moles at the rezidentura who was betrayed by Ames. Motorin too was quickly executed after he was exposed.
- 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.
- 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.” 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. Back in the USSR, Fedorenko used political connections to get himself out of trouble. Years later, Fedorenko met his friend Ames for an emotional reunion over lunch and promised to move to the US for good. Ames promised to help. Shortly after lunch, Ames betrayed him to the KGB for a second time. Fedorenko escaped arrest, defected, and is currently living in Rhode Island.
CIA response
As early as 1985, the CIA's network of Soviet-bloc agents began disappearing at an alarming rate. The CIA noticed that something was very wrong, but was reluctant to admit that there was a mole in the agency. 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 mole, 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. One of Ames's co-workers (also a friend of his wife) noted that Mrs Ames was able to make payment in full for drapes in their house, even though that co-worker (in similar circumstances) was obliged to pay in installments. Despite Ames's official salary of $60,000 USD he was able to afford:
- A $400,000 house in Arlington, Virginia, paid in cash;
- A $60,000 Jaguar car;
- Monthly phone bills exceeding $6,000, mostly calls by Ames's wife to her family in Bogota, Colombia;
- Tailored suits replacing Ames's regular 'bargain basement' clothes, conspicuously better than those of his CIA colleagues;
- A credit score far in excess of his income—Ames maintained premium credit cards where the minimum monthly payment exceeded his monthly salary.
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 polygraph test, or had learned or been trained how to defeat the "lie detector". Ames himself admits that the techniques needed to defeat the polygraph are relatively easy to learn and perform; and critics claim 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.
Arrest
In February 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."
On February 22 1994, Ames and his wife were formally charged by the United States Department of Justice with spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. Ames could have faced the death penalty, since his betrayal had 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. Upon her release from prison, Rosario was deported to South America to reside.
Ames is federal prisoner #40087-083 and is currently housed in the high security US Penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania.
Ames received a total of $4.6 million for his spying, over $2 million of which remains to this day in an undisclosed bank account. Russian intelligence has refused to disclose this bank account information in order for the United States to seize it; arguing that the money was rightfully earned by Ames and will remain his (although it is unknown how Ames will be able to collect it).
Ames is, to date, the highest paid spy in American history, and is one of five known spies to have earned the "big money" ($1 million or more). Clyde Lee Conrad, Larry Wu-Tai Chin, John Anthony Walker, and Robert Hanssen are the other four.
In popular culture
Ames' story is dramatized in the 1998 movie Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within, with Timothy Hutton as Ames. 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.
In The Recruit, Al Pacino states that operational security is almost entirely focused on external espionage, and that the CIA will always be vulnerable to internal espionage, and cites the examples of "Ames, Nicholson, Howard."
Ames is referred to several times in the 2007 movie Breach, which tells the story of FBI spy Robert Hanssen ("Have you heard of Ames?", Hanssen's character asks).
Ames is featured in the board game "Twilight Struggle" by GMT Games. The game allows players to lead either the USA or USSR through the Cold War as each attempts to influence other nations. It uses a card-driven strategy system. Ames is on one card during the Late Cold War era. The event on the card forces the US player to display his hand to the Soviet player. The latter then arranges the cards in an order that the US player must play.
Other notable American moles
Other Agents in place in the US Government or Military who worked as a Mole for either the KGB or the SVR, include:
- James Hall III - An Army warrant officer and intelligence analyst in Germany who sold eavesdropping and code secrets to East Germany and the Soviet Union from 1983 to 1988.
- Robert Hanssen - Arrested for spying for the Soviet Union and Russia for more than 15 years of his 27 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
- Earl Edwin Pitts - An FBI agent charged with providing Top Secret documents to the Soviet Union and then Russia from 1987 until 1992.
- Harold James Nicholson - A senior-ranking Central Intelligence Agency officer arrested while attempting to take Top Secret documents out of the country. He began spying for Russia in 1994.
- George Trofimoff - a retired Army Reserve colonel, charged in June 2000 of spying for the KGB and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (or SVR) for over 25 years.
Footnotes
Further reading
- Earley, Pete. , New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1997. ISBN 0-399-14188-X
- Maas, Peter. 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
External links
- U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, " (April 1997) - Unclassified Executive Summary
- "", Federal Bureau of Investigation (Mar. 27, 2005) - A short description of Ames' spying career
- , CNN Cold War Series (1998) - Aldrich Ames in his own words
|
| |
|
|
