A Luxurious Life And Loaded Swiss Accounts: Meet CIA Traitor Aldrich Ames

Aldrich Ames, a former CIA turncoat convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia, has died in prison. He was 84.

For nearly a decade, he lived a life of luxury. He had cash in Swiss bank accounts, a Jaguar in the driveway, and $50,000 in credit card bills. Yet, he betrayed the country he was sworn to protect. His double life collapsed in February 1994 when he was arrested and confessed to passing classified CIA information to the Soviets and later to Russian intelligence.

On April 28, 1994, Ames stood in a US courtroom and admitted that he had given Moscow “virtually all” the Soviet agents he knew and a “huge quantity” of sensitive US material. Asked why he did it, he cited financial pressures, calling them “the basest motives” and “immediate and continuing.”

Over nine years, Ames received more than $2.5 million in exchange for secrets.

Who Was Aldrich Ames?

Born in 1941, Aldrich Ames spent more than three decades at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), primarily in counterintelligence, the branch tasked with rooting out foreign spies.

Ames's career should have raised red flags long before his crimes came to light. Struggling with alcohol and poor work habits, he once left a briefcase full of classified documents on a subway. Despite this, he rose to become the head of the CIA's Soviet counterintelligence branch, a role that gave him almost unrestricted access to the agency's deepest secrets.

How The Betrayal Began

By April 1985, Ames's financial troubles had become severe. Amid a costly divorce from his first wife and mounting expenses with his second, Rosario, he approached the Soviet Embassy in Washington and offered the names of CIA agents operating inside the USSR. This was the start of a nine-year spree of espionage.

Plastic-wrapped CIA documents revealing surveillance technology, secret missions, and the identities of US spies, passed from Ames to the KGB, peeling away American intelligence networks.

Consequences

The consequences were severe.

Agents were arrested, tortured, and executed. Among the victims was General Dmitri Polyakov, a high-ranking Soviet officer who had been a CIA asset for decades.

Even Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB colonel secretly working for Britain's MI6, narrowly escaped discovery. “I wanted to share my knowledge with them,” Gordievsky later said, “and now I realise [Ames] was sitting there... which means that everything, all the new answers of my information, he must have passed to the KGB.”

How Aldrich Ames Was Caught

For years, Ames's betrayal went undetected while he enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. He bought luxury cars, paid for Rosario's surgeries, and lived in a $540,000 home on a $60,000 salary.

By the early 1990s, the CIA and FBI had begun to notice inconsistencies. American intelligence assets in the Soviet Union were disappearing or turning up dead at an alarming rate. Operations that had once seemed secure were suddenly failing. For nearly a decade, the Agency had been searching for a mole within its ranks. A joint task force was formed to investigate Ames.

By 1994, the net tightened, and Ames and Rosario were arrested outside their Arlington home on February 21.

Confession

In court, Ames pleaded guilty to espionage and tax evasion as part of a deal to avoid the death penalty. He received a life sentence without parole, while Rosario served five years. The CIA was left reeling. Then-director James Woolsey resigned, his successor John Deutch initiated a sweeping overhaul, and US-Russia relations were strained.