Remembering Aldrich Ames and the Lives He Destroyed

“I would never wish death upon anyone, but I have read some obituaries with great satisfaction.” - Winston Churchill

OPINION -- I associate myself with at least the latter part of that quote from Winston Churchill with regard to Aldrich Ames. To my knowledge, I met Ames on only one occasion. It was during a cocktail party in 1989 or 1990 when he oversaw the CIA operations group responsible for what was then Czechoslovakia. I have no clear recollection of that event, but I was later told that fellow traitor Robert Hanssen was also in attendance. If so, to paraphrase Shakespeare: ‘Hell was empty and the devils were there’.

While I can recall little about meeting Ames at that party, my colleagues and I lived – and still live – with the consequences of his betrayal. The loss of an agent is a very personal thing for those responsible for securely handling him or her. I saw that impact up close early on in my career.

Toward the end of my training as an operations officer in late 1982, I was summoned to the office of the then-chief of Soviet Division (SE). In that era, a summons to a meeting with any Division Chief - much less the head of what was then the most secretive operational component – could be unnerving for any junior officer. The initial moments of my appointment with then-C/SE, Dave Forden, were appropriately unsettling. He began by asking me whether I had stolen anything lately. Having never purloined anything ever, I was taken aback. After I answered no, he asked if I could pass a polygraph exam. Again surprised, I responded that I could the last time I took one. ‘Good’, Forden said, ‘you are coming to SE to replace Ed Howard in Moscow’. Howard, whom I had met during training, had been fired from CIA for a variety of offenses. He later defected to the USSR, betraying his knowledge of CIA operations and personnel to the KGB.

After completing training, I reported to SE Division. Shortly thereafter, I was told I would not be going to Moscow after all. Instead, I was informed, I would be going to Prague. Initially, I was a bit disappointed not to have a chance to test my skills against our principal adversary. In hindsight, however, that change in plan was fortuitous. While I could not know it at the time, my SE colleagues who went to Moscow would be there during the grim mid-1980’s period in which our agents were being rolled-up by the KGB. Many CIA officers involved with those cases would have to live for years thereafter wondering what had happened to their agents and whether anything they had done had contributed to their arrests and executions. My colleagues’ ordeals would only end with the revelation that one of our own was a spy.

But Ames was more than a spy. He was a killer. His career floundering and burdened by growing debt, Ames decided to solve his money problems by selling the identities of several low-level CIA agents to the KGB. Consequently, on April 16, 1985 he walked into the Soviet Embassy and passed on the following note: "I am Aldrich H. Ames and my job is branch chief of Soviet (CI) at the CIA. […] I need $50,000 and in exchange for the money, here is information about three agents we are developing in the Soviet Union right now.” He attached a page from SE Division's phone list, with his name underlined, to prove he was genuine. Within weeks, fearful that Soviet spy John Walker had been fingered by a CIA agent within the KGB, and worried that he might likewise be exposed, Ames decided to comprise all of the CIA and FBI Soviet sources he knew of. “My scam,” he later said, “was supposed to be a one-time hit. I was just going to get the fifty thousand dollars and be done with it, but now I started to panic.”

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Accordingly, on June 13, 1985, Ames passed the Soviets what he called “the Big Dump.” That tranche of documents contained the identities of at least 11 CIA agents. Brave men who had risked all in deciding to serve freedom’s cause, many of them would be arrested, interrogated and ultimately executed.

Ames’s rationalization of this act says everything about the kind of man he was. “All of the people whose names were on my list knew the risks they were taking when they began spying for the CIA and FBI,” he said, before adding that, "They knew they were risking prison or death.”

He would repeatedly seek to justify his actions by claiming that his espionage for the USSR was morally equivalent to what Western services had long done against their adversaries. Oleg Gordievsky, a British spy within the KGB and one of the few agents betrayed by Ames who escaped, rightly rejected any such equivalency. "I knew,” he said, that “the people I identified would be arrested and put in prison. Ames knew the people he identified would be arrested and shot. That is one of the differences between us.”

Sentenced to prison, Ames would spend almost 32 years of his life behind bars. I like to think that punishment was worse than death. One hopes he whiled away hours in his cell thinking of what he’d done and the lives he took. He expressed contrition during the plea bargain and sentencing process to ensure leniency for his wife, Rosario, saying, for example, that, "No punishment by this court can balance or ease the profound shame and guilt I bear."

But I very much doubt the sincerity of such statements because he showed no signs of having a troubled conscience thereafter. Instead, in statements while incarcerated, Ames was at pains to give his actions a veneer of ideological justification. "I had,” he said, “come to believe that the espionage business, as carried out by the CIA and a few other American agencies, was and is a self-serving sham, carried out by careerist bureaucrats who have managed to deceive several generations of American policy makers and the public about both the necessity and the value of their work.”

“There is an actuarial certainty that there are other spies in U.S. national security agencies and there always will be.” That statement by former CIA Chief of Counterintelligence Paul Redmond in the wake of the Ames and Hanssen cases reflects a grim reality of the intelligence profession.

Nonetheless, when I joined CIA, it was accepted wisdom that the Agency had never had, and could never have, a spy in its ranks. With the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to understand how such a naïve conviction could have taken hold given the repeated penetration of our predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and our British counterparts by Soviet intelligence. “There will,” as CIA Chief of CI James J. Angleton said, “always be penetrations…it is a way of life. It should never be thought of as an aberration. Anyone who gets flustered is in the wrong business.”

Perhaps the downplaying of such a possibility was a natural reaction to the overreach of Angleton himself with his ‘HONETOL’ spy hunts which hindered the Agency’s ability to mount operations against the Soviets for years at the height of the Cold War. It was certainly a reflection of institutional arrogance.

Whatever the reason, the idea that a foreign intelligence service could recruit a serving CIA officer as a spy was inconceivable to many. That mindset makes the accomplishment of Redmond and the Agency team led by Jeanne Vertefeuille, concluding that reporting from a Soviet mole – ultimately determined to be CIA officer Aldrich Ames – was the cause of the losses, all the more remarkable.

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The years-long hunt for the agent the KGB called “KOLOKOL” (‘Bell’) ended on February 21, 1994 with the arrest of Ames by the FBI. The assessment of the damage that Ames had inflicted on U.S. national security in exchange for some $2.5 million from Moscow was, not surprisingly, extensive. Even in the analogue era, he was able to pass along voluminous documentary and oral reporting to Moscow. This included reporting on his own debriefing of Vitaliy Yurchenko, who defected briefly to U.S. before returning to the USSR.

But it was the review of Ames’s role in compromising our courageous agents that struck home with us. Their sacrifice is commemorated by the CIA ‘Fallen Agent Memorial’ and other memorials within Agency spaces. And one hopes that someday the Russian people, too, will come to realize that Military/Technical researcher Adolf G. Tolkachev (GTVANQUISH); KGB Line PR officer Vladimir M. Piguzov (GTJOGGER); KGB Line PR officer Leonid G. Poleschuk (GTWEIGH); GRU officer Vladimir M. Vasilyev (GTACCORD); GRU officer Gennadiy A. Smetanin (GTMILLION); KGB Line X officer Valeriy F. Martynov (GTGENTILE); KGB Active Measures specialist Sergey M. Motorin (GTGAUZE); KGB Illegals Support officer Gennadiy G. Varenik (GTFITNESS); KGB Second Chief Directorate officer Sergey Vorontsov (GTCOWL); and the highest-ranking spy run by the U.S. against the USSR; GRU General Dmitry F. Polyakov (TOPHAT, BOURBON and ROAM); sacrificed everything for them and for their country.

“The life of the dead,” Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote, “is placed in the memory of the living.” For my part, I will remember Ames as the base traitor he was and the men he killed as the heroes they were.

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