The son of a CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA) officer, born June 26, 1941, Aldrich Ames worked summer jobs for the agency in his teens and joined full-time in February 1962. He quickly mastered Russian and distinguished himself in handling matters related to the Soviet Union. Lust intervened to sidetrack his career in 1981 while Ames was assigned to Mexico City. There, he met and fell in love with Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, a cultural attaché with the Colombian embassy who persuaded Ames to divorce his wife and marry her. Ames soon discovered that his salary could not satisfy Maria’s expensive tastes, and his quest for additional money led him to become a mercenary Russian “mole” within the CIA.
Between 1985 and his arrest on February 21, 1994, Ames earned more than $2.5 million by selling
classified information to Russian spies, his betrayal continuing beyond the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Aside from delivering thousands of CIA documents, Ames also identified 25 Russian
nationals employed as spies by the CIA or the FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI). All were arrested by the KGB, with at least 10 subsequently executed. Those losses belatedly prompted a joint CIA-FBI investigation, beginning in 1991, but both agencies somehow ignored
Ames’s extravagant lifestyle until May 1993 when he was betrayed by a KGB defector. G-men then placed Ames under close surveillance, including phone taps, searches of his household trash (revealing notes from a Russian contact), and retrieval of information stored on his computer. Ames and his wife were both indicted on April 26, 1994, Ames quickly striking a bargain on Maria’s behalf. The couple pleaded guilty to various charges on April 28, Ames receiving a sentence of life without parole for conspiracy and tax fraud, while Maria received a sentence of five years and three months. Both the FBI and the CIA were widely criticized for their apparent negligence in plugging the deadly intelligence leak.
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