Sandy Grimes
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John Kiriakou named Sandy Grimes as the CIA officer who said: "This is ridiculous. Either we're going to do an investigation or we're not." Up to that point, the Aldrich Ames case had been handled by a 27-year-old who had received a security file and done nothing with it for a year and a half.

Grimes's method was pattern analysis, and Kiriakou has described it from two directions. She correlated the times Ames met his KGB handler, named in the transcript as Sergei Chevakin, with the times he then made large bank deposits, in 1985 and 1986. And she noted that every time Ames traveled to Mexico City, he made unusually large bank deposits, $100,000 or $150,000, within days of returning. This was the pre-9/11 era, before anti-money-laundering reporting requirements applied to large cash transactions. Nobody else had made the connection. Grimes concluded: "He goes to Mexico City. He comes back. And then within days, he puts $100,000 in the bank. He's got to be spying for the Russians."

The question she put first was cruder than any of the tradecraft, and Kiriakou repeats it as the whole of the case: "How can a man who makes $70,000 a year live in a $2 million house, drive a Jaguar, and then brag around the office that he's installed a built-in pool and a gazebo?" She had suspected Ames early; the deposits proved, in her words, that he was "a goddamn Russian spy."

Kiriakou is explicit that the hunt was not abstract for her. GRU Colonel Dmitry Polyakov had been an agent of hers, and was among the assets Ames burned: "She took Ames's crimes personally."

After Ames's arrest, Grimes conducted the CIA's post-mortem review, the "hot wash" of lessons learned. She sent a paper to CIA Director John Deutch recommending that 27 people be reprimanded up the chain of command. Ames had been a visibly incapacitated alcoholic for twenty years, and rather than being removed he had been promoted each time, eventually to chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet branch, where he held the actual names of every CIA source inside the Kremlin and KGB. The promotions, Kiriakou explained, followed a pattern of passing problems up the chain so they became someone else's responsibility. Deutch chose not to reprimand twenty-seven people; he placed a strongly worded letter in the files of seven. Grimes quit. Kiriakou dates the departure to "early 1993", before the February 1994 arrest, which sits awkwardly against the post-arrest review in the same account; the sequence is recorded as he gives it.

Grimes died on 25 July 2025. Marking her passing alongside Ames's, Kiriakou described her as "a key part of the team that caught Ames" and a CIA officer "with a long and very distinguished career."

See also

- Aldrich Ames
- Robert Hanssen
- CIA
- John Kiriakou
