How AldrichAmes became the most harmful double agent in the United States

Aldrich Ames sold nearly a decade of confidential information to the Soviet Union, compromised over 100 secret operations, leading to the death of at least 10 Western Intelligence Report assets. On April 28, 1994, Double Agent was imprisoned for life. That February, the BBC spoke with one of the spies who was betrayed by Ames but lived to tell the story.

In 1985, Soviet agents working for the CIA suddenly began to disappear. These Western intelligence sources were picked up by the Soviet intelligence agency, KGB, and were executed very frequently.

Oleg Gordievsky was one of those double agents. As station chief for the London KGB, he worked secretly for many years at the UK foreign intelligence agency MI6. However, one day he finds himself in Moscow, exhausted after five hours of questioning and faces the very real possibility of death by firing a veteran. Goldievsky fled narrowly in his life after the Mi6 smuggled him from the Soviet Union in car boots.

After that, Goldievsky tried to settle the person who gave him away. “For nearly nine years I have been guessing who betrayed me and who was the source. I had no idea the answer,” he told BBC’s Tom Mangold in a February 28, 1994 interview with Newsnight. Foreign services known to me.”

On April 28, 1994, Ames admitted that he had compromised over 100 secret operations by leaking his identity as more than 30 agents were spying on the West. Ames’ betrayal, known to the KGB by his code name, Korokol (Bel), led to the implementation of at least 10 CIA intelligence assets, including General Dmiti Polyakov, who had provided at least 10 CIA intelligence assets to the West for over 20 years, including General Dmiti Polyakov, a senior Soviet Army intelligence officer. Ames, the most harmful KGB mole in US history, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Just as British spy spy spy Kim Philby as a Soviet agent in the 1960s shook British facilities, it was “now Washington’s turn to stare at distrust at the extent of Ames’ damage,” Mangold said in 1994.

It was Ames’ role as head of the CIA’s Soviet anti-intellectual division that allowed him to cause such damage. It provided him with almost free access to classified information about US secret operations against the Soviet Union and, importantly, the identity of agents on the ground. Ames’ position meant he could sit down with reports from other western spy agencies. This is how he contacted him, Colonel Goldievsky, the UK’s most valuable spy, Colonel KGB, who had passed important intelligence to two British services, MI6 and MI5. These meetings will create a distinctive situation where “top KGB exiles have been reported by top KGB moles,” Mangold said.

“The Americans were very thorough and the debriefing was very good,” Goldievsky said. “I was enthusiastic. I liked Americans. I wanted to share my knowledge with them. [Ames] He sat there. I mean, all, all new answers of my information, he must have been handed over to the KGB. ”

Aim was exposed to the world of spy at a young age. His father was a CIA analyst and helped his son get a job at an agency after he dropped out of college. However, the decision to betray the intelligence reporting agency after Ames is not much driven by ideological unrest by his money needs.

Initially, Ames made his promise as an anti-intellectual officer. He was first posted to Turkey in the late 1960s along with his wife Nancy Segebard, where he was tasked with recruiting foreign agents. But by 1972, his boss had returned Ames to the CIA headquarters and felt that he hadn’t been cut off for fieldwork. Back in the US, he learned Russian and was assigned to a local operational plan for Soviet officials.

His father’s struggle with alcohol halted his CIA career, and likewise Ames’s own heavy drinking began to derail his progress. In 1972 he was discovered by another agent and was drunk and in a compromised position with a female CIA employee. The situation was not helped by Ames’ illegal attitude towards work, leaving a briefcase full of information classified as a subway in 1976.

To get his career back on track, Ames accepted a second overseas mail to Mexico City in 1981, with his wife staying at home in New York. However, his actions and continued drinking excessively meant that he could not distinguish himself as a CIA officer. In 1981 he was involved in a traffic accident in Mexico City and was so intoxicated that he was recognized as answering police questions and as an officer at the US embassy sent to help him. After a certain drunk and blasphemous discussion with Cuban officials at a diplomatic reception at the embassy, ​​his boss recommended that the CIA evaluate him for alcoholism when he returns to the United States.

Ames also continued to engage in extramarital affairs. Towards the end of 1982, he began his relationship with Colombian cultural attachés recruited for CIA jobs, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy. Their romance became increasingly serious until Ames divorced his first wife, married Rosario, and decided to bring her back to the United States with him.

Despite the low stellar performance in the CIA, Ames continued to fail upwards. When he returned to the agency’s headquarters in 1983, he became the anti-intellectual director of Soviet operations, giving him extensive access to information about secret CIA activities.

Ames had agreed to pay monthly assistance to pay the debts arising as a couple as part of the divorce settlement to Nancy. With the expensive taste of his new wife Rosary, his love for the shopping explosion and frequent calls to her family in Columbia, Ames’ money issues have gone out of control. He later told Arizona Sen. Dennis Deconsini that it was his escalating debt that led him to reflect on the secret sales he had access to. “I felt a lot of financial pressure, and it was obviously overreacting, looking back,” Ames said.

“I don’t think he was trying to make him believe he was more than that,” FBI agent Leslie G. Weiser, who was involved in the investigation that led to Ames’ arrest, told BBC Witness History in 2015.

On April 16, 1985, Ames walked straight to the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, as he drank several drinks to build up his courage. Upon entering, he accepted the receptionist a document showing the names of several dual agents, a CIA insider’s credentials, and a note requesting $50,000. He claims in a Senate Report He initially believed this was a one-off deal to drive him out of his financial black hole, but he soon realized he had “crossed the line.” [and] I could never retreat.”

For the next nine years, Ames was paid to carry over a wealth of secret information to the KGB. He photographs classified documents detailing everything in detail, from listening devices connected to Moscow’s space facilities to new cutting edge technology that could count the nuclear warheads of Soviet missiles, wrapping them in plastic bags and simply transporting them out of the CIA. His role included official meetings with Russian diplomats, so he was often able to meet face-to-face handlers without arousing doubt. He also left a packet of documents categorized into a secret, pre-located site called Dead Drops.

“If he’s going to do a dead drop, he’ll put a choke mark in his mailbox before, and the Russians will see that choke mark, and they’ll know that the documents were loaded into the drop,” Weiser said. “Later, when they got the document, they go and erase the chalk mark. He knew that the document transfer was done safely and securely.”

It was through Ames’ secret leaks that the KGB identified virtually all of the Soviet CIA’s spies and effectively shut down US secret operations there. “I don’t know of any other spies or moles in the US. The sudden disappearance of so many CIA assets sparked a search for moles within the agency in 1986, and Ames continued to slide under the radar for the best part of the decade.

And he was brilliantly paid for his betrayal and received a total of about $2.5 million from the Soviet Union. Ames made little attempt to hide his new wealth. Despite not having a salary of over $70,000 a year, he bought a new $540,000 home in cash, spent tens of thousands of dollars improving the home, and bought a Jaguar car. It would be his gorgeous lifestyle and spending that would put him in the spotlight and lead to his final arrest by Wiser’s FBI team in 1994.

After he was greeted by the FBI, Ames worked with the authorities. He detailed the scope of his espionage in exchange for a plea deal that secured Rosary’s generous sentence, which she admitted to know about his meeting with the Soviets. She was released five years later. Ames, the best CIA officer exposed as a double agent, continues his offering Life sentence at the US federal prison in Tele Auto, Indiana.

To this day, Ames had little regret for his actions or the death they led. “He had a very high opinion of himself,” Weiser said of Ames. “He regrets being caught. He doesn’t regret being a spy.”

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