American Spies: Espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the Present

18 Aldrich Ames and His Impact on the CIA

1 8 189 Aldrich Ames and His Impact on the CIA Thanks to Ames, we all but shut down CIA operations in Moscow. VIKTOR CHERKASHIN, one of Aldrich Ames’s KGB handlers; Cherkashin, Spy Handler, 4 On February 21, 1994, the vast majority of CIA employees were shocked to see one of their colleagues, Aldrich Ames, on the television news, in handcuffs , flanked by men in FBI blue jackets who pushed him into an unmarked car. The headline emblazoned on the screen read SOVIET SPY ARRESTED . Spies in the US government abounded in the 1980s. But a CIA veteran at the center of Soviet operations? Inconceivable. Yet the inconceivable had now happened. A small circle of CIA officers knew that Ames would be arrested.1 For almost a decade, they had wrestled with a gnawing problem: America’s best spies inside the Soviet government, one after the other, had been caught and executed by the KGB in the mid-1980s. At the height of the Cold War, when information from these spies was crucial for President Ronald Reagan’s clash with the Soviet Union, they had been picked off in rapid succession by the KGB and eliminated. Edward Lee Howard was unaware of most of the spies, so his treachery could not explain the losses. Espionage and the New World Order: The 1990s 190 Clayton Lonetree and another US Marine Corps guard may have let the KGB into the US Embassy in Moscow, but this explanation was also discarded after an exhaustive review of CIA documents in Moscow.2 The mystery was finally solved. All along, it had been one of the CIA’s own. Aldrich Ames spied for the Soviet Union and then for the Russian Federation for nine years. He volunteered to spy for the Soviet KGB in April 1985, in the midst of the “Year of the Spy.” Two months later, he betrayed the names of every major Soviet spy working for the CIA. If he had quit spying that very day, he would have still justified the assessment of his espionage by then–CIA deputy director Robert Gates: “There is no doubt that the Agency’s greatest counterintelligence failure and perhaps operational failure during the last half of the Cold War was Ames’s treason and his work as a Soviet mole in the heart of CIA’s clandestine service.”3 In return for his treachery, Ames was the highest-paid American spy of the Cold War (the highest-paid known spy, that is). He was not only one of five in the $1 million club; he stood alone in the $2 million ranks, with a hefty $2.5 million in cash payments and KGB accounts by the time of his arrest. He earned twice as much money as John Walker in half the time. “Rick” Ames, as he was known among his colleagues, was born in the rustic town of River Falls, Wisconsin, in May 1941. His parents were both teachers —his father, Carleton, was a history professor; and his mother, Rachel, was a teacher in the local high school. Carleton’s specialty was Asia, and in the formative years of the CIA he was enlisted by the agency to serve a tour in Southeast Asia. Carleton Ames, however, proved to be a heavy-drinking, plodding officer who received less-than-glowing appraisals of his performance . Unfortunately, most of his children inherited his unlucky genes. Three of his four children, including Rick, developed drinking problems.4 Rick Ames enrolled in the University of Chicago in 1959 to pursue dual interests in international relations and drama. Drawn more by the Bohemian life of the theater, he flunked out of college. In 1962, he followed his father’s footsteps into the CIA and eventually earned a degree by studying nights at George Washington University. He was then accepted into the clandestine service and, after training, he was assigned overseas to conduct espionage operations in Istanbul and then in Mexico City. Before his first tour in Turkey, Ames married a fellow CIA employee, Nancy Segebarth, but the marriage was already on the rocks by the time he Aldrich Ames and His Impact on the CIA 191 met Maria Del Rosario Casas Dupuy on his tour in Mexico City. Rosario, a cultural attaché in the Colombian Embassy, had been recruited by one of Ames’s colleagues to provide information on Soviet bloc diplomats in the Mexican capital...