Aldrich Ames: Double Agent

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts from an article published in TIME magazine on March 7, 1994.)

On a hot August afternoon in 1985, Aldrich Hazen Ames exchanged vows with Maria del Rosario Casas Depuy in a charming little church nestled by a hill in Arlington, Virginia. It was the bridegroom's second marriage, the bride's first. The small knot of family members and friends, sweltering in the humid, 87 degree air, might have expected to be rewarded with a meal for their attendance. But after the ceremony, guests were offered only wine. Ames explained he couldn't afford a fancy reception because the cost of his previous marriage's breakup had cleaned him out. Guests had no reason to doubt him. His divorce from Nancy, a fellow Central Intelligence Agency employee, had become final only 12 days earlier in New York City. In preceding months, Ames had complained bitterly to colleagues at the CIA that the long, messy divorce had gutted his modest civil service paycheck, leaving him "poor."

But Ames' finances had taken a sharp turn for the better in a way that he could not admit to his colleagues. Actually, he and Rosario had enough money to spring for champagne, canapes and caviar. Three months before, on May 18, Rosario had made a $9,000 cash deposit in her checking account at the Dominion Bank of Virginia. Before their wedding day, that nest egg would grow to $38,100 as Rosario made another deposit and Ames made five deposits to his own checking account at the same bank. The money had come from Moscow.

On that sticky day in August 1985, Ames had a lot on his mind. Only 10 days earlier, Vitali Yurichenko, a senior Soviet intelligence official, had defected -- or pretended to defect -- to the U.S. Ames had been assigned to meet Yurichenko's plane at Andrews Air Force Base, but after a night of drinking, he'd overslept his alarm and arrived a few minutes late. Now, after that inauspicious start, Ames was involved in debriefing Yurichenko every day on KGB operations against Western countries, including penetration of U.S. agencies. Ames was also preparing for a transfer from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to Rome and was trying to master Italian.

At the same time, Ames may have been concerned that his marriage was frowned upon by his CIA superiors. The couple first met in 1982 while holding down posts in Mexico City, he as a CIA case officer, she as a cultural attache at the Colombian embassy. The next year, he put her on the CIA payroll as an informant. By the time they left Mexico later that year, Rosario was his girlfriend. CIA case officers are not supposed to have affairs with their agents or marry foreign nationals. Somehow Ames got away with doing both.

That was the least of what Ames and his wife were up to. They had a secret that would become too big to conceal. Over the next nine years, according to a detailed affidavit released last week by federal prosecutors, Ames allegedly sold the KGB and its successor agency, the MBRF, the names of Soviet agents who had been recruited by the CIA, as well as valuable secrets about U.S. surveillance of the Soviet Union. During that time, the couple made dozens of large cash deposits to two Virginia banks in the U.S. and abroad. Eventually these transactions totaled $1.5 million -- all of it allegedly paid to the Ameses by the Soviet Union, then by Russia, in exchange for national security secrets. Last week Ames, 52, and his wife, 41, were arrested in Arlington, Virginia, and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. If convicted, they could face life in prison.

In Washington officials speculated that the Ames case could prove to be the worst betrayal of intelligence agents in U.S. history. With Ames refusing to talk and his wife only hinting that she might cooperate, spymasters and legislators could only guess at the extent of the damage. Ames knew the true names of virtually all the Soviet agents, and later Russian ones, being recruited. As many as a dozen CIA operations may have been compromised as a direct result of the Ameses' activities, resulting in the execution of as many as 10 Soviet agents. There was no indication that Ames had passed along military secrets, but the possibility that he tipped off Moscow to virtually every CIA intelligence-gathering operation against the Soviets in recent years poses grave questions about America's security apparatus in the post-Cold War era.

Politicians were quick to ask those questions. Democrat Dan Glickman of Kansas, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, pledged an "extensive, exhaustive review" of the case. Republicans in both chambers demanded a "rethinking" of the Clinton administration's close ties to Russian President Boris Yeltsin and threatened to halt aid to Russia if Moscow didn't come up with some explanations -- and fast.

The administration took several steps to calm the mounting fury. President Clinton demanded that Moscow immediately withdraw from Washington any Russians involved in the alleged espionage, and called for cooperation in U.S. efforts to assess the damage. A high-level CIA team was dispatched to Moscow to obtain information from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. After they returned empty-handed, Clinton ordered the expulsion of Alexander Lysenko, a Washington-based Russian "diplomat" who is reputedly the MBRF's top-ranking official in the U.S.

The most uncomfortable questions have more to do with U.S. intelligence failures than Russian perfidy. When and where was Ames recruited? Did he recruit his wife -- or was it the other way around? Why did their activities go undetected for so long? Given his GS-14 salary of $69,843, why didn't their $540,000 house and $65,000 Jaguar raise alarms? When did CIA and FBI investigators begin to catch on? If it was as early as 1986 and no later than 1991, why did investigators wait so long to make the arrests? Most important, are there other moles burrowed within the CIA?