Aldrich Ames

Aldrich Hazen Ames, known as Rick, was born on May 26, 1941, in River Falls, Wisconsin, to Carleton Cecil Ames and Rachel Ames (née Aldrich). His father lectured at Wisconsin State College at River Falls and his mother taught high school English. He was the eldest of three children and the only son.

In 1952 his father began working for the CIA's Directorate of Operations, and in 1953 he was posted to Burma for three years, taking the family with him. His father's career later stalled, partly because of alcoholism, and he spent his remaining years at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Ames attended McLean High School in McLean, Virginia, appearing in its 1958 yearbook. From 1957 he spent three summers as a low-ranking GS-3 records analyst at the CIA, marking classified documents and making training money for the agency's Farm, under a program offering temporary jobs to employees' children.

He entered the University of Chicago in 1959 to study foreign cultures and history, but his long-time love of theater pulled him away from his studies and he did not finish his second year. He later worked as an assistant technical director at a Chicago theater. After returning to the CIA he completed a bachelor's degree in history at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., about five years after starting full-time work there.

Ames joined the CIA full time in 1962 in clerical roles. After reaching grade GS-7 with good appraisals, he was accepted into the Career Trainee Program despite several alcohol-related brushes with the police.

His first overseas posting was Ankara, Turkey, where he worked to recruit Soviet intelligence officers and helped penetrate the communist Dev-Genç organization. His performance was rated only satisfactory and one assessment said he was unsuited to field work. From 1972 he worked at headquarters in the Soviet and East European Division, managing assets with generally enthusiastic reviews, although his drinking was noted in his file.

In New York from 1976 he handled Soviet nuclear weapons expert Sergey Fedorenko and Arkady Shevchenko, the UN under-secretary-general who in 1978 became the highest-ranking Soviet official to defect to the West. He was rated excellent and promoted, but he committed security violations, including leaving a briefcase of classified operational material on the subway.

In Mexico City from 1981 his reviews were mediocre, his drinking caused concern, and he began an affair with Rosario Casas Dupuy. In September 1983 he returned to headquarters and was placed in the branch responsible for Soviet counterintelligence, giving him access to CIA plans and operations against the KGB and GRU. He was later posted to Rome from 1986 and from 1990 to 1991 worked in the Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group.

In April 1985 Ames gave the Soviets information on two CIA agents that he believed was essentially valueless, in exchange for $50,000. He later said he had only meant to clear his debts, but having crossed a line he could never step back. Within weeks he identified more than ten top-level CIA and FBI sources inside Soviet services.

The KGB, which code-named him Kolokol (The Bell), rolled up the American network quickly. Sources lost included GRU Major General Dmitri Polyakov, KGB officers Valery Martynov, Sergei Motorin and Leonid Poleshchuk, and radar engineer Adolf Tolkachev, all of whom were executed. Ames also provided information on Oleg Gordievsky, the MI6 source who escaped to Britain in 1985. In court he admitted compromising virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other services known to him.

He met his Soviet embassy contact Sergey Chuvakhin openly, presenting the lunches as a recruitment effort. He admitted receiving about $2.5 million in total; other estimates put the figure as high as $4.6 million. He explained his new wealth with a story about his wife's rich Colombian family. To deflect suspicion, the KGB staged diversions, including a false lead pointing investigators toward a CIA communications facility in Warrenton, Virginia. Ames passed CIA polygraph examinations in 1986 and 1991.

From late 1986 a CIA team led by Paul Redmond, with Jeanne Vertefeuille, Sandra Grimes, Diana Worthen and Dan Payne, investigated the losses. By 1990 the agency was sure it had a mole. A colleague reported in 1989 that Ames was living beyond his means, and investigators found a $540,000 house in Arlington paid for in cash, a Jaguar, expensive renovations, capped teeth, tailored suits and credit card bills that exceeded his salary.

The FBI began an intensive investigation in March 1993, with electronic surveillance, searches of his trash and a tracker on his car. With Ames due to travel to Moscow, agents arrested him in a staged traffic stop near his home on February 21, 1994, and arrested Rosario at the house. He told officers they had the wrong man.

Charged in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Ames pleaded guilty to espionage and tax evasion. On April 28, 1994, Judge Claude M. Hilton sentenced him to life without parole. Under the plea agreement Rosario received five years for tax evasion and conspiracy to commit espionage. Ames was not eligible for the death penalty because his crimes predated the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act.

Ames married CIA officer Nancy Segebarth, whom he met in the Career Trainee Program, in 1969. They separated in 1983 and divorced on August 1, 1985; the settlement left him with debts and monthly support payments he later cited as the pressure that first pushed him toward Moscow.

Nine days after the divorce, on August 10, 1985, he married María del Rosario Casas Dupuy, a Colombian cultural attaché and former CIA informant he had met in Mexico City. Their son, Paul Ames, was born in 1989. Rosario was arrested with him in 1994 and served a five year sentence. Throughout his adult life Ames struggled with heavy drinking, which colleagues and superiors repeatedly noted.

Ames repeatedly said his spying began over money, and FBI agent Leslie Wiser, who worked on the case, said it was about the money and that Ames never really claimed otherwise. Ames also said that betraying the sources would reduce the risk of his own exposure. In his court statement he described his surprise that the KGB set aside $2 million for him.

He spoke dismissively of the polygraph after his arrest, saying confidence and rapport with the examiner were what mattered. He also said he feared exposure by Soviet defectors more than by American investigators, because virtually every American jailed for espionage had been identified by a Soviet source.

The Ames case is regarded as one of the most damaging intelligence breaches in American history. Investigators estimated that he compromised at least 100 operations and caused the execution of at least ten sources. His betrayal also allowed the KGB to feed controlled agents to the CIA from 1986 to 1993, and some of that material reached three U.S. presidents.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's 1994 report criticized the CIA's handling of his suitability problems. CIA Director James Woolsey declined to fire anyone and later resigned under pressure. Congress gave the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court power to authorize physical searches, and after the Ames and Hanssen cases the CIA and FBI tightened insider threat programs, financial disclosure and polygraph screening. The mailbox Ames used to signal his handlers is now held by the International Spy Museum in Washington.

Ames's case has been covered in several books, including Killer Spy by Peter Maas (1995), Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy by Tim Weiner, David Johnston and Neil A. Lewis (1995), Confessions of a Spy by Pete Earley (1997), based on prison interviews, and Circle of Treason by CIA officers Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille (2012). KGB officer Victor Cherkashin, who recruited him, wrote Spy Handler (2005).

Timothy Hutton played Ames in the Showtime film Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within (1998), with Joan Plowright as Jeanne Vertefeuille and Elizabeth Peña as Rosario. Paul Rhys played him in the 2014 ABC miniseries The Assets, based on Circle of Treason.

The CIA was heavily criticized for failing to focus on Ames sooner despite his obvious change in lifestyle, his drinking and his record of security lapses. Some intelligence writers, including former CIA officer Tennent Bagley, argued that some sources Ames betrayed may already have been controlled by the KGB. Rafi Eitan, the Israeli handler of Jonathan Pollard, alleged that Pollard was blamed for some of the damage Ames caused. Ames's lawyer Plato Cacheris threatened to challenge the warrantless searches of his home, but the guilty plea made the issue moot.

Ames died on January 5, 2026, at the Federal Correctional Institution, Cumberland, in Maryland, where he was serving his life sentence as federal prisoner 40087-083. He was 84. The Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed the death and said a Maryland medical examiner would determine the cause, which has not been made public. News of his death was reported on January 6, 2026. Funeral and burial details have not been made public.