Rosario Ames was a Colombian cultural attaché who had been recruited to work for the CIA, and who became the second wife of Aldrich Ames. John Kiriakou places her at the centre of the motive rather than the tradecraft: the affair, the debt, and the walk into the Soviet embassy form a single chain.[1]
The affair began in 1981, when the agency sent Ames to Mexico to recruit Soviet officials and he had little success at it. Beginning a relationship with an asset was a violation of agency regulations; Kiriakou records it among the run of misconduct for which Ames was promoted rather than disciplined. In the transcript her full name is given as Maria del Rosario Casas de Puí.[1]
Ames’s marriage to fellow CIA officer Nancy Segbarth “collapsed for good” when he brought Rosario to America — and her mother with her. Rosario and her mother, in Kiriakou’s account, “had a taste for high living, which quickly put Ames deep in debt.” It was that pressure Ames later described to Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini, then 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 called a clever plan — sell the KGB some limited information for fifty thousand dollars and clear the debt.[2][3]
She was arrested with her husband at their home in Arlington, Virginia, on 21 February 1994. Ames pleaded guilty two months later, and the life sentence he accepted was traded in part for leniency toward her: Rosario received 63 months, served only four years, and was released in 1998, returning to Colombia where the couple’s young son Paul was being cared for by his grandmother.[4][5]