How Aldrich Ames became the US’s most damaging double agent

Aldrich Ames spent almost a decade selling secret information to the Soviet Union, compromising more than 100 clandestine operations and causing the death of at least 10 Western intelligence assets. On April 28, 1994, the double agent was imprisoned for life. In February of that year, the BBC spoke with one of the spies that was betrayed by Ames, but lived to tell the story.

In 1985, the Soviet agents who worked for the CIA suddenly began to disappear. One by one, Western intelligence sources were collected by the Soviet Intelligence Service, the KGB, questioned and, very often, executed.

Oleg Gordievsky was one of those double agents. As head of the KGBS station in London, he had been working secretly for the United Kingdom’s external intelligence service, Mi6, for years. But one day he found himself in Moscow, drugged, exhausted after five hours of interrogation and facing the very real possibility of death by the shots squad. Gordievsky escaped by little from his life after Mi6 he against him from the Soviet Union in the trunk of a car.

Subsequently, Gordievsky tried to find out who had resigned from him. “For almost nine years, I have been guessing who the man was, who was the source that hired me, and I knew any response,” BBC’s mangold told Tom Mangold in an interview with the slides of the February agent 1994. Gordievsky Alswer later. Ames stood up in an American court room and confessed to commit “all virtual Soviet agents of the CIA and other US and foreign services known to me.”

On April 28, 1994, AMES admitted that he had disseminated the identities of more than 30 agents spying on the West, and pledged more than 100 clandestine operations. Known by the KGB by its name in Code, Kolokol (The Bell), the betrayal of AMES had resulted in the execution of at least 10 intelligence assets of the CIA, including General Dmitri Polyakov, a senior official in intelligence of the Soviet army, which had provided information. Ames, the most harmful kgb mole in the history of the United States, was sentenced and sentenced to life imprisonment without probation.

As well as the British exhibition of Spy Kim Philby as a Soviet agent in the 1960s he had shaken the establishment of the United Kingdom, “now Washington’s turn looked incredulously at the point of damage of AMES,” Mangold said in 1994.

It was the role of AMES as head of the Department of Soviet counterintelligence of the CIA that had allowed him to cause such damage. He gave almost uninterrupted access to classified information about the United States undercover operations against the USSR and, crucially, the identities of his agents in the field. Ames also had Meean in which he could sit in reports from other Western spy agencies. This is how the most valuable spy in the United Kingdom, Gordievsky, a kgb colonel that passed the vital intelligence to two British services, Mi6 and Mi5, came into contact with him. These meetings would create the extravagant situation in which “the main deserter of the KGB was informed by the top of KGB superior,” Mangold said.

“The Americans were very thorough and really very good in the reports,” Gordievsky said. “I was enthusiastic. I liked Americans. I wanted to share my knowledge with them, and now I realize [Ames] I was sitting there. That all that, all, all the new responses of my information, must have passed to the KGB. “

Ames had been exposed to the world of spies at an early age. His father was a CIA analyst who helped his son get a job at the agency after abandoning the university. But the subsequent decision of Begray the intelligence service would be relected less by the ideological mission as for its need for money.

Initially, AMES was promising as an counterintelligence officer. He was first published with his wife Nancy Segebarth, a CIA agent, Turkey in the late 1960s, where he was commissioned to recruit foreign agents. But in 1972 his superiors had called on a return to the headquarters of the CIA, they feel that he was cut for field work. Back in the United States, he studied Russian and was assigned to field operations planning against Soviet officials.

His father’s fights with alcohol had stagnated his career in the CIA and, in a similar way, the great drink of AMES to derail his progress. In 1972, he was discovered by another agent, innovated and in a compromising position with a CIA employee. The situation was not helped by AMES’s disagreement attitude towards work, which saw him leave a letter full of information classified in a meter in 1976.

In an effort to recover his career, AMES accepted a second publication abroad in Mexico City in 1981, while his wife stayed at home in New York. But their behavior and continuous drinking to drink meean that could not be distinguished as a CIA officer. In 1981, he was involved in a traffic accident in Mexico City, and was so drunk that he could not answer the police questions or even raise an officer of the United States Embassy sent to help him. After a particular argument drunk of blasphemy-Laaden with a Cuban official at a diplomatic reception in the embassy, ​​his superior recommended that the CIA evaluate it for alcohol addiction to his return to the United States.

Ames also continued to participate in extramarital matters, one of which would be a turning point for him. By the end of 1982, hey a relationship with a Colombian cultural aggregate recruited to work for the CIA, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy. His romance became increasingly serious until Ames decided to divorce his first wife, marry Rosario and bring her back to the United States with him.

Despite his performance less than star in the CIA, Ames continued to fail up. Upon his return to the agency headquarters in 1983, he was becoming head of the counterintelligence branch for Soviet operations, which gave generalized access to information about the clandestine activities of the CIA.

AMES had agreed as part of his divorce agreement to Nancy to pay the debts they had captured as a couple, in addition to paying the monthly support. Composed of the expectations of his new wife Rosario, his love for purchasing spree and his frequent telephone calls to the family’s resumption in Colombia, AMES’s money problems were uncontrolled. Later he would say to the Senator of Arizona Dennis Deconcini that they were his growing debts that led him to contemplate the sale of the secrets he had access. “I felt great financial pressure, which, in retrospect, was clearly reacting exaggerated,” AMES said.

“It was about money, and I don’t think he really tried to bring anyone to believe that it was more than that,” said FBI Leslie G Wiser agent, who was involved in the investigation that led to Ames’s trial, said the story of the Witnesses of the BBC.

On April 16, 1985, after drinking some drinks to build his courage, Ames entered directly into the Russian embassy in Washington DC. Once inside, the receptionist passed an envelope that contains the names of some double agents, documents that show their credentials such as privileged information of the CIA and a note that requires $ 50,000. He would affirm in a report by the Senate who had initially believed that this was a unique agreement to get him out of his financial black hole, but his son realized that he had “crossed a line, [and] I could never step back. ”

During the next nine years, AMES was paid to approve a lot of secret information to the KGB. It would take classified documents that stop everything, from listening devices connected to the Moscow space installation to new latest generation technologies that could count the nuclear Soviet missile eyelets, wrapped in plastic bags. Since his role involved official meetings with Russian diplomats, he was able to meet his managers face to face without arouse suspicion. It would also leave packages or documents classified in pre -established secret sites called Dead Drops.

“If I was going to make a dead fall, I would first place a chalk brand in a mailbox, for example, and the Russians would see that chalk brand, and then I would know that the fall had been loaded with the documents,” Wiser said. “Later, when they recovered the documents, they would go and delete the chalk brand. I would know that the transfer of documents was carried out safely.”

It was through the escape of secret intelligence information that the KGB would identify virtual and all the spies of the CIA in the Soviet Union, effectively closing its undercover operations of the United States there. “I am not aware of any other spy or mole in the United States that has caused such loss of human life in terms of human assets,” Wiser said. The sudden disappearance of so many CIA assets gave alarms and activated the search for mole inside the agency in 1986, but Ames would continue to slide under the radar during the best part of a decade.

And he was generously paid for his betrayal, recovering a total of approximately $ 2.5 million of the Soviet Union. Ames made little attempt to hide his new wealth. Despite never having a salary of more than $ 70,000 a year, he bought a new house of $ 540,000 in cash, spent tens of thousands or dollars on home improvements and bought a Jaguar car. It would be his luxurious lifestyle and spending that would place it in the center of attention, and lead to his possible judgment of the Wiser FBI team in 1994.

After the FBI picked it up, Ames cooperated with the authorities. The detailed scope of its espionage activities in exchange for a guilt agreement that secured an indulgent sentence for Rosario, who admitted that she had known about cash and its meetings with the sooviets. It was released after five years. Ames, the highest rank officer of the CIA who has been exposed as a double agent, continues to comply with his life sentence in a federal penitentiary of the United States in Terre Haute, Indiana.

To this day, AMES has shown very little remorse for their actions or for the deaths they took. “He had a very high opinion of himself,” Wiser said about Ames. “He regrets being caught. He doesn’t regret being a spy.”

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