One of the worst traitors in American history has died. Aldrich Ames was a CIA officer who spent years spying for the Soviet Union before he was arrested in 1994. Ames died, fittingly enough, in a federal prison. His legacy offers important lessons for American policymakers contending with growing espionage threats.
Ames died on Monday at the Federal Correctional Facility in Cumberland, Maryland. He was 84 years old. As the longtime national security correspondent Walter Pincus observed, Ames was responsible for the “most damaging breach” in the CIA’s history, “reportedly causing the deaths of at least 10 recruited CIA or allied intelligence agents.” Ames was a double agent for nine years, beginning in the mid-1980s and ending with his arrest by the FBI in February 1994.
Pincus, who covered Ames’s arrest and trial, once asked the turncoat why he betrayed his country. Ames cited financial reasons, including massive debt. He made millions over his years of clandestine service for the KGB and later, its successor service, the SVR. But given the scope and scale of his betrayal, it’s clear that Ames had other motives besides money.
The son of a CIA officer, Ames first began working for the agency as a paid intern of sorts during his high school years in Northern Virginia. He later spent more than three decades working for the CIA, eventually joining the clandestine service in 1967. Ames married a CIA officer and was “in every sense married to the CIA,” as the historian Tim Weiner wrote in his book on the case.
Like his father, Ames was both an alcoholic, a long-standing malcontent, and a malingerer. His personnel reports, Weiner noted, “were a chronicle of drunkenness and ineptitude.” Frustrated at these negative performance reviews, he spent most of his career harboring resentments toward his colleagues and superiors. Ames felt that his “genius” had gone unappreciated. As he later said, he felt that he alone “knew what was best for foreign policy and national security.”
Yet, he failed upward, and by 1985, he was given access to the files of nearly every U.S. spy behind the Iron Curtain.
In April of that year, he began giving the information to a contact in the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. In short order, the Russians began kidnapping, torturing, and murdering those whom Ames had betrayed. Some in the agency initially refused to believe that there was a traitor in their midst. To protect their valued asset, the KGB fed into these perceptions by using other double agents to funnel misleading information, setting the CIA on a wild goose chase for bugs or broken codes. Later, when he was under suspicion, Ames was coached by his handlers into passing polygraph tests.
AMERICANS ARE DRINKING LESS, WHY?
Eventually, Ames’s lavish lifestyle and spending habits raised eyebrows, and the CIA and FBI began monitoring his movements and conversations. Eventually, Ames was arrested and confessed. The final tally of his betrayal will never be known, but no fewer than nine murders and hundreds of millions of dollars in canceled operations can be laid at his doorstep. As Fred Hitz, the CIA’s then-inspector general, later noted: “In strict intelligence terms, it was a horror” for the United States.
Neither Ames nor the Soviet Union exists anymore. Today, the U.S. confronts rising espionage threats from enemies the world over. Some, notably China’s Ministry of State Security, possess money and technological capabilities that their KGB progenitors would envy. But the Ames case shows that spying is ultimately about people; both their motivations and their ability to be manipulated. And while tech may change, human nature does not.
The writer is a Washington D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.
