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, 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.[2] 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.”[3]
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.”[2][4]
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.”[4]
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.[5][6][7] 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.[4]
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.”[2]