Aldrich Ames
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Aldrich Ames was a senior officer of the Central Intelligence Agency who covertly supplied the Soviet Union with the identities of American assets, resulting in multiple executions and the loss of at least twelve lives. John Kiriakou treats the case as the definitive test of the agency's ability to police itself, and records that it failed the test for nine years.

The walk-in

On 16 April 1985, Ames, by then a thirty-one-year CIA counterintelligence officer, walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington DC "and he betrayed America." He offered the Soviets the identities of two KGB double agents who were posted to that same embassy and who had been recruited by the CIA. In return he was paid $50,000. "That was to start."

Both double agents were executed. Over the next nine years Ames became, in Kiriakou's phrase, the most damaging KGB mole in United States history, taking more than $2 million from his Soviet paymasters. To his handlers he was Kolokol, "the bell."

Access, and what it cost

Ames entered the agency in the 1970s, advancing to GS‑15 and eventually to chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet branch. In that capacity he possessed the names of every CIA source who had penetrated the Kremlin or the KGB. Kiriakou frames the case around exactly that access: as director of counterintelligence in the Soviet Operations Division, Ames could see "literally every recruited CIA asset in the Soviet Union and Russia. And, surprise, they all started dying. Executed one by one by one."

Ames ultimately confessed to identifying more than thirty agents and to compromising over a hundred clandestine operations. Beyond the recruited assets, he also exposed a number of the CIA's own officers serving under non-official cover, all of whom had to be pulled out of the field, Kiriakou raises this in the context of a former NOC he himself had worked for who was outed by Ames, and is candid that the work was beyond him: "I couldn't do it." The operational secrets, plans and protocols he sold gave the Soviets deep insight into how the United States reacted and what it thought, which, Kiriakou says, "crippled us against the Soviets for a period of years."

Asked to rank the great penetrations of the Cold War, Kiriakou places Ames second only to the Cambridge ring, extraordinarily well placed, lastingly damaging, with twelve CIA assets executed because of his treachery. Both Ames and Robert Hanssen, the two most notorious traitors working for the Russians, had each been chief of counterintelligence for Russian operations, a coincidence Kiriakou raises as a warning that there are "more people in government working for foreign governments than you might think."

Greed, not belief

Kiriakou draws the contrast with Kim Philby deliberately. Philby, perhaps the most damaging mole in British intelligence history, was at least "driven by a passionate belief in communism" and felt genuine contempt for British imperialism. "Ames, on the other hand, did it purely for his, quote, greed and folly, as simple as that. Talk about the banality of evil." The word was Ames's own: "banal was a word that Ames himself used to describe what he did." It is consistent with what Kiriakou says counterintelligence training holds generally, that ninety-five per cent of the time, a person accepting a pitch is doing it for money.

Failing upward

The second player in the story, on Kiriakou's account, was alcohol. Ames's father was an alcoholic, and also a CIA officer, an analyst who helped his son get his first job at the agency despite Ames being a college dropout. Alcoholism had stalled the father's career, and it marked the son's record permanently. A supervisor once described Ames as "one of the worst drunks in the outfit." His drunken escapades were notorious, and they were tolerated.

The career that followed was a sequence of failures rewarded. His first overseas posting, to Ankara in the late 1960s, was to recruit foreign agents; his superiors at Langley decided he was not cut out for field work and recalled him to Washington, put him through a Russian course, and set him to supporting operations against suspected Soviet spies in Washington and New York. In 1972 another officer stumbled on Ames and a female CIA employee drunkenly having sex in the office, "which I hate to tell you is far more common than you might think." In 1976 he left a briefcase stuffed with classified information on the subway. His attitude to work was described as lackadaisical.

In 1981 the agency sent him to Mexico to recruit Soviet officials. He had little success, but did begin an affair, in violation of agency regulations, with a Colombian cultural attaché who had herself been recruited to work for the CIA: Rosario. On his return to headquarters in 1983 he was promoted, and made chief of the Soviet operations counterintelligence branch. "Imagine that."

The debt

Ames's marriage to fellow CIA officer Nancy Segbarth collapsed for good when he brought Rosario to America, along with her mother. The two women "had a taste for high living, which quickly put Ames deep in debt." Ames later described the pressure to Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: "I felt a great deal of financial pressure, which in retrospect I was clearly overreacting to."

In April 1985 he devised what he himself called a clever plan: sell the KGB some limited information for fifty thousand dollars and pay off the debt. "That was the whole plan going in. But Ames realized quickly that he'd already crossed a line and there was no going back. And so he doubled down and tripled down on his betrayal. And that's how the worst mole in US history got rolling."

His spending was conspicuous enough to be evidence in itself: a $2 million house in Arlington, Virginia, a Jaguar, elsewhere Kiriakou puts it at $80,000, and an in‑ground pool with a gazebo, on a $70,000 annual salary, while known by everyone in the office to be drunk throughout the workday.

Why it took nine years

Kiriakou gives three reasons, and only one of them is the KGB's doing.

The first was exhaustion. A fear of moles had tormented successive CIA directors and deputy directors, "most famously deputy director for counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton", and that produced a counter-reaction: "a lot of people inside the CIA were just exhausted by this constant hunt for moles."

The second was denial. The Directorate of Operations, "the elite within the elite", rejected as unthinkable the very idea that there could be a mole in the CIA. Kiriakou's summary is unsparing: "This culture of misplaced secrecy covered for its brethren regardless of their errors, failures, misdemeanors and outright crimes."

The third was an active deception. In 1986 Ames told the KGB he feared becoming a suspect, and when the mole hunt resumed the KGB built a diversion: a Soviet case officer told a CIA contact that the mole was stationed at the Warrenton Training Center, a secret agency communications facility in Virginia. Mole hunters took the bait, investigated ninety employees there for almost a year, and produced ten suspects, the lead investigator noting that "there are so many problem personalities that no single one stands out."

The agency's own internal handling was no better. A report on Ames was sent to a 27-year-old security officer, who sat on the file for eighteen months while Ames continued to spy; the officer eventually drove to Ames's house, looked at it, said "Wow, that's a really nice house," and left. Kiriakou's verdict on what finally undid Ames is therefore not flattering to the counterintelligence apparatus: "It wasn't so much the agency's work that eventually outed Ames as it was Ames's own complete stupidity. But then greed has never made anyone smarter."

Sandy Grimes

It was Sandy Grimes, a CIA analyst, who broke the case, and Kiriakou has described her method in two complementary ways. 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 noticed that every time Ames travelled to Mexico City he made deposits of $100,000 or $150,000 within days of returning; in the pre‑9/11 era there was no anti‑money‑laundering reporting requirement that would have flagged them automatically. Nobody else had made the connection.

Her framing of it was simpler than any of the tradecraft. She was the first to ask "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, she said, that he was "a goddamn Russian spy." She had a personal stake as well: GRU Colonel Dmitry Polyakov had been an agent of hers, and was one of the assets Ames burned. "She took Ames's crimes personally."

Arrest, plea and sentence

The FBI placed Ames under surveillance, and on 21 February 1994 he and Rosario were both arrested at their home in Arlington, Virginia. He pleaded guilty two months later to providing highly classified information to the KGB and its successor, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. In return for a lenient sentence for his wife, Ames accepted life imprisonment with no possibility of parole; Rosario received 63 months, served four years, and was released in 1998.

The plea also spared Ames the death penalty in exchange for cooperating with the FBI's investigation, a bargain he could not fully honour, because by then he could not remember most of what the investigators needed. Kiriakou attributes this to the drinking: decades of alcohol had rotted his brain. He was nonetheless promoted grade after grade throughout.

The accounting afterwards

Grimes conducted the CIA's post‑mortem review, the "hot wash", and sent the director a paper recommending that 27 people be reprimanded up the chain of command that had promoted a visibly incapacitated alcoholic into the most sensitive counterintelligence post in the agency. Director John Deutch instead placed "a very strongly worded letter" in the files of seven of the twenty‑seven. Grimes quit. Kiriakou has separately said that no one was fired, demoted or reassigned over the failure, a refusal by Director James Woolsey that cost Woolsey his own job.

Kiriakou's tellings differ on when Grimes left. In one account she resigned after the hot wash, and the year given is 1993; in another, "in early 1993, Sandy resigned from the CIA." Both place the resignation before the February 1994 arrest, which sits awkwardly against the post‑arrest review in the same account; the sequence is left as he gives it.

The mole Ames caused

Ames's exposure produced a second traitor. Harold Nicholson, an officer in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and a colleague of Kiriakou's, had been passed over for promotion and was angry, believing he was not appreciated. Around the time Ames was caught, Nicholson "foolishly came to the conclusion that, well, the KGB's mole was caught, they'll be looking for another mole." He flew overseas, walked into the Russian embassy, and said "I'm a senior CIA officer and I want to work for the KGB."

Kiriakou's verdict

Kiriakou makes a single exception to a position he otherwise holds without qualification: "I've long been personally opposed to the death penalty, but not in the case of Aldrich Ames." Ames's treachery resulted in the deaths of at least twelve people. "I would consider him to be akin to a serial killer or a mass murderer, someone who is just so dangerous to society that he has to be done away with."

Death

Ames died in 2026 at the age of 84. Kiriakou has given two different places: in the mini-episode recorded shortly after the death, "the maximum security federal penitentiary in Cumberland, Maryland"; in a later interview, the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Both accounts are his own and are recorded here as given.

See also

- Sandy Grimes
- Rosario Ames
- Dmitry Polyakov
- Warrenton Training Center
- Harold James Nicholson
- Robert Hanssen
- Kim Philby
- John Kiriakou
