CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames, who helped the Soviets, dies at 84

NEW YORK - Aldrich Ames, the most murderous turncoat in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose betrayal in working for the Soviet Union went undetected for almost a decade, died on Jan 5.

He was 84 and had been a federal prisoner, serving life without parole, since 1994.

The death was recorded in the federal Bureau of Prisons inmate database.

A spokesperson said he died at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland.

The son of an alcoholic CIA officer, Ames failed upward through the agency ranks for 17 years until he attained a headquarters post of extraordinary sensitivity.

He became the chief of the counter-intelligence branch of the CIA’s Soviet division in September 1983.

He had access to some of the nation’s deepest secrets – in particular, its clandestine liaisons with the Soviets, who worked in secret with US intelligence.

These were a small cadre, barely a dozen all told, who were cultivated over the course of two decades and well-placed in Soviet government agencies and embassies around the world.

As the Cold War was cresting, Ames decided that he would change the course of history by upending a long-running game of nations, the contest of spy versus spy.

He saw it as a charade. By his own account, he was fuelled by a toxic cocktail of vodka, arrogance, delusions of grandeur and naked greed.

In April 1985, he took his first gamble. He hand-delivered an envelope addressed to the KGB chief at the Soviet Embassy in Washington.

He offered a smattering of CIA secrets, and he requested US$50,000 in return.

He identified himself by name and rank. The relationship was sealed over a long, boozy lunch at an elegant hotel near the White House.

Then he bet the house. Ames feared that one of the CIA’s Russians might betray him, so he decided to betray them all. He knew he would be paid a fortune.

“I panicked,” he said in a 1994 interview with The New York Times, conducted from jail.

“Only by suddenly giving them everyone” would he be protected – and he knew in return that he would be paid “as much money as I could ever use, if I chose to do that”.

Ames put together hundreds of secret documents in a 2.7kg stack – a who’s who of Soviets working for the CIA and an encyclopaedia of US intelligence operations behind the Iron Curtain.

He stuffed them in his briefcase, walked out of headquarters and delivered them to a contact at the Soviet Embassy.

“I was delivering myself along with them,” he said in the 1994 interview. “I was saying, ‘Over to you, KGB. You guys take care of me now’.”

The KGB took care of him – he was paid at least US$2.7 million – and it took care of its own turncoats.

As many as 10 Soviet and Soviet-bloc spies were arrested, interrogated and executed for treason.

One was imprisoned. At least two escaped, one step ahead of their pursuers.

The network that had provided the US with political, military, diplomatic and intelligence insights on Moscow was destroyed.

The KGB did its best to fill that void with disinformation and double agents for the rest of the Cold War.

These deceptions distorted the debate over policy and strategy towards Moscow at the highest levels of US government, Mr John M. Deutch, the CIA’s director in 1995, said at the time, and they subverted the CIA in its central mission of the Cold War: understanding the Soviet threat. The falsehoods sustained the view that the Soviet Union was a superpower, even as it was collapsing.

Ames also revealed the identities of two dozen other US intelligence officers and foreign agents working for the CIA and exposed some 50 secret operations in Russia, Europe and Latin America, the agency concluded.

As the CIA’s Russians disappeared, one by one by one, the agency began to fear that it had a traitor in its midst. But the search for the mole sputtered and ground to a halt.

In 1986, Ames went on a three-year assignment in Rome, where he devoted much of his time to rooting out secrets for the Soviets and drinking his lunch; he once passed out in the street after a US Embassy party.

Then, in 1989, a CIA officer reported that Ames, on returning to Washington, was inexplicably wealthy: He had paid US$540,000 in cash for a new home near the agency’s headquarters, and he was driving a new Jaguar.

This set off the faintest of alarms.

The agency’s clandestine service took more than a year to forward these concerns to its internal-security office. That office assigned one investigator to the case, an inexperienced man in his 20s, who put the investigation aside for months.

It was not until 1993 that a formal criminal investigation began, spurred in large part by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI put handcuffs on Ames on Feb 21, 1994, and he became a prisoner from that day on.

Ames, who was known as Rick, was born on May 26, 1941, in River Falls, Wisconsin, the eldest of three children and the only son of Professor Carleton Ames, of European and Asian history at the local state teachers college, and Mrs Rachel (Aldrich) Ames, a high school English teacher.

In 1951, a recruiter from the CIA came to River Falls and offered Prof Ames a job.

China had gone communist, the Korean War was raging, and the agency, barely four years old, was casting its net far and wide for Americans who thought they knew how Asians think.

In 1953, the Ameses of River Falls landed in the capital of Burma, now Myanmar, with Prof Ames under cover as a Ford Foundation scholar.

His daytime drinking was apparent to fellow American expatriates. He was a failure as a spy, winning no confidences and recruiting no agents.

But he did impart one secret: On a steamboat headed up the Irrawaddy River towards Mandalay, 12-year-old Aldrich Ames learnt that his father worked for the CIA.

He was intrigued. In 1957, after the family returned to the Washington area, he took a summer job at the agency as a handyman. In 1962, three years after graduating from high school, he joined the CIA as a clerk at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Five years later, after earning a college degree in history from George Washington University, he officially joined the nation’s clandestine service at the age of 26.

He married a fellow spy, Ms Nancy Segebarth, in May 1969, and they set off together for the CIA station in Ankara, Turkey.

Ames was a disappointment to his station chief Duane Clarridge, who wrote him up as unfit for the life of a spy overseas and best suited for a desk job far behind the front lines of the Cold War.

He earned a billet on the home front by learning Russian and joining the CIA’s Soviet division.

The distinct smell of alcohol kept wafting up from his personnel file. Worse, Ames left a briefcase with highly sensitive documents on a train, potentially exposing a Soviet diplomat working for the CIA.

Yet he was promoted twice: to the New York station, which focused on the United Nations, and then, in 1981, to Mexico City, a hotbed of Soviet espionage in the Western Hemisphere.

Ames closeted himself in his classified quarters, did little or no work and began hitting the bottle as never before.

After a drink-driving incident and a near-brawl at an embassy reception, his station chief recommended a medical leave for his alcohol abuse. Headquarters did nothing.

With his marriage unravelling, Ames wooed Ms Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, the cultural attache at the Colombian Embassy and a recruited CIA source.

He asked her to marry him – she said she would – and he belatedly asked for the CIA’s approval.

An extramarital relationship with a foreign national was a potential career-ender. In Ames’ case, however, it was not. After he won a divorce, they married.

In 1983, Ames became the Soviet division’s counter-intelligence chief and began calling for the files on the CIA’s most sensitive operations.

His wife, who went by Rosario, was arrested along with her husband – she had learnt about his treason and happily spent the proceeds – and received a five-year prison term.

Their son Paul, then five years old, went to live with his mother’s relatives in Colombia.

At his 1994 sentencing, Ames denounced American espionage as “a self-serving sham” run by bureaucrats who had deceived generations of Americans about the value and necessity of their work.

The CIA’s director at the time, Mr R. James Woolsey, decided that no one should be punished for dereliction of duty in the Ames case, despite a determination by the agency’s inspector general that 23 senior officials bore responsibility. He instead issued 11 letters of reprimand.

A damage assessment by CIA and FBI officials never got to the bottom of the case.

Ames, his memory damaged by alcohol, could not recall the scope of the secrets he sold. And he failed the polygraphs, or lie-detector tests, they gave him, leaving them in doubt as they assayed a decade of deception and destruction.

Ames was clear on one count in his 1994 interview with the Times.

He said he had sentenced himself to a living death: “The men I sold... What happened to them also happened to me.” NYTIMES