Aldrich Ames, who has died in prison aged 84, was the most senior CIA officer ever to be exposed as a Russian spy. Ames betrayed more than 30 allied agents, at least 10 of whom were executed by the classic KGB punishment of a bullet in the back of the head, and more than 100 clandestine US and British espionage operations.
The US and British agents betrayed by Ames included Maj Gen Dmitri Polyakov, a senior member of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, who supplied top level information to the CIA, the US foreign intelligence agency, for more than a quarter of a century, and Oleg Gordievsky, an MI6 agent inside the KGB, who, when he was outed by Ames, was the KGB rezident or head of station, in London.
Ames, whose father had also been a CIA officer, was recruited in 1967. His first overseas posting was to Ankara in Turkey in the late 1960s along with his then wife, Nancy Segebarth, a fellow CIA officer, whom he had married in 1969. It was not a success and he was recalled to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, sent on a Russian course and given a post supporting operations against Soviet officials in Washington and New York.
In 1981, he was sent to Mexico to recruit Soviet officials as agents. With his marriage falling apart, and in a clear breach of protocol, he began an affair with a CIA agent inside the Colombian embassy, María del Rosario Casas Dupuy. Yet again, he had little success recruiting agents of his own and was recalled to Langley, where he was put in charge of ensuring the security of all the CIA’s Soviet agents.
Two months after his return to the US, he was joined by Rosario, who became his wife, and her mother, both of whom had a taste for high living. Ames was soon in debt and in April 1985 devised what he thought “a clever plan” to sell the KGB some limited information for $50,000 to pay off his debts.
He placed it in an envelope addressed to the KGB rezident at the Soviet embassy in Washington and delivered it himself. A month later, in May 1984, he met the deputy rezident Victor Cherkashin, who told him that the information was not enough to be paid. He obviously had more names – who were they?
At that point, Ames told him as much as he knew about a top MI6 agent inside the KGB. He did not know his name, but what he did know pointed the finger towards Gordievsky, who two days later was recalled to Moscow, where he was suspended, drugged, interrogated and accused of being a spy. Crucially he admitted nothing, and was never arrested. When Moscow Centre eventually began to close in on him, Gordievsky activated an exfiltration plan and was smuggled across the border to Finland by MI6 in the boot of a car.
Ames tried to stick to the original plan of providing limited information, telling Cherkashin that CIA agents inside the KGB might find out about him, but Cherkashin told him they had no way of protecting him if they did not know who those agents were.
Ames later told his CIA and FBI interrogators that he realised then that having “crossed a line, I could never step back”. He barely hesitated before taking out a notebook and writing down a list of names, Cherkashin said. “He tore out the page and handed it to me. I was shocked. It was a catalogue of virtually every CIA asset within the Soviet Union.” Ames simply told the KGB officer: “Just make sure these people don’t find out anything about me.”
Over the next 18 months, every major source the CIA and the FBI had inside the Soviet Union disappeared. At least 10 of those whose names were handed over by Ames, in what would become known as “the big dump”, were subsequently shot dead. The killings were spaced out over a drawn-out period to make it more difficult to identify a single reason as to how each of the agents had been blown.
Polyakov, the most important of the CIA agents to be executed, was not arrested until 7 July 1986. He was executed in March 1988, shot like all the others with a single bullet to the back of the head.
Ames was by then in Rome, where he spent some of the £10,000 a month the KGB were paying him on a second-hand Jaguar. Wary of depositing the money in his Italian bank he opened a separate account at Credit Suisse in Zurich, later telling his CIA and FBI debriefers, without any apparent sense of irony, that as he drove the Jaguar over the Alps into Switzerland, with his wife by his side, he pictured himself as the new James Bond.
Ames was born in River Falls, Wisconsin, the eldest of three children of Carleton Ames, a professor of European and Asian history at a local college, and his wife, Rachel (nee Aldrich), an English teacher. He studied drama at the University of Chicago before dropping out and taking a job as a clerk-typist at CIA headquarters, eventually being selected to train as a case officer.
He was eventually caught when Sandra Grimes – a CIA officer who had worked with Polyakov and was determined to track down the person who had betrayed him – found evidence that Ames had met a Soviet official, under the pretence of trying to recruit him, three times over the summer of 1985. After each of the meetings, Ames had made bank deposits of up to $9,000.
Ames was placed under surveillance by the FBI and, on 21 February 1994, he and Rosario were arrested at their home in Arlington, Virginia. He pleaded guilty two months later to providing highly classified information to the KGB and its successor, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, in return for a lenient sentence for his wife, and was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole.
Rosario was sentenced to 63 months in jail, but served only four years before being released in 1998, and returning to Colombia, where their young son, Paul, was being cared for by his grandmother.
• Aldrich Hazen Ames, intelligence officer and spy, born 26 May 1941; died 5 January 2026
