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.[1]
Grimes’s method was pattern analysis. 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.”[2]
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.[3][4][5]