Aldrich Ames, the double agent that caused the most damage to the US during the Cold War

“For almost nine years I have been trying to find out who the man was, who was the source that betrayed me, and I did not find the answer,” he told Tom Mangold, BBC's research journalist in an interview with Newsnight on February 28, 1994.

Two months later, Gordievsky obtained the answer when the veteran official of the CIA, Aldrich Ames, appeared before an American court and confessed to having committed “practically all the Soviet agents of the CIA and other US and foreign services he knew.”

On April 28, 1994, AMES admitted having disseminated the identity of more than 30 agents spying for the West and having committed more than 100 clandestine operations and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Known in the KGB by its name, Kolokol (“La Campana”), the betrayal of Ames resulted in the execution of at least 10 CIA intelligence agents.

Among them was General Dmitri Polyakov, a senior intelligence official of the Soviet army who had provided information to the West for more than 20 years.

Ames, the most harmful spy of KGB in the history of the United States, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without probation.

This conviction forced Washington to have to “disbelieve the magnitude of the damage caused by the double agent,” Mangold explained in 1994.

It was the role of AMES as head of the Department of Soviet Counterintelligence of the CIA that allowed it to cause such damage.

He gave practically without restrictions on classified information about the undercover operations of the United States against the USSR and the identity of its agents on the field in the middle of the cold war.

His position also allowed him to read the reports of other Western Espionage Agencies.

This is how the most valuable spy in the United Kingdom, Gordievsky, a kgb colonel who transmitted vital information to British intelligence, came into contact with him.

These meetings would create the unusual situation in which “the main deserter of the KGB was interrogated by the main top of the KGB,” Mangold said.

“The Americans were very thorough and really good with the reports,” Gordievsky said

“I was excited. I liked Americans. I wanted to share my knowledge with them and now I realize that (AMES) was there. Which means that all the new information I received, he should have transmitted it to the KGB,” he added.

Ames had been exposed to the world of espionage from a young age. His father was a CIA analyst and helped his son get work at the agency after leaving the university.

But the subsequent decision to betray the intelligence service was due to its profit more than ideological biases.

Initially, AMES proved to have great potential as an counterintelligence officer. At the end of the 60s, he was destined for Türkiye with his wife Nancy Segebarth, also Agent of the CIA, where he was in charge of recruiting foreign agents.

But by the early 70s, his superiors ordered him to return to the CIA headquarters because he was not done for field work. Back to the US, he studied Russian and was assigned to plan field operations against Soviet officers.

His father's alcohol problems had stagnated his career in the CIA, and the same excessive consumption of AMES began to derail his progress.

In 1972, another agent discovered him drunk and in a compromising situation with a CIA employee. The situation did not improve due to AMES's indifference to work, which led him to leave a briefcase full of information classified in the subway 4 years later.

In an effort to resume his career, Ames accepted a second destination abroad, in Mexico City, in 1981, while his wife stayed in New York.

However, their behavior and continuous excessive alcohol consumption made it not possible to distinguish itself as a CIA officer.

That same year he suffered a traffic accident in the Mexican capital and was so drunk that he could not answer the police questions not even recognize an official of the American embassy sent to help him.

After a discussion – in drunkenness and full of blasphemies – with a Cuban official at a diplomatic reception at the embassy, ​​his superior recommended that the CIA evaluate it by alcohol addiction to his return to the US.

Ames also continued having extramarital relationships, one of which would mark a turning point for him.

At the end of 1982, it began a relationship with a Colombian cultural aggregate recruited to work for the CIA, María del Rosario Casas Dupuy.

His romance intensified until Ames decided to divorce his first wife, marry houses and move with her to the US.

Despite his performance less than star in the CIA, Ames continued to ascend.

Upon his return to the agency headquarters in 1983, he was appointed head of the counterintelligence branch for Soviet operations, which gave him broad access to information about the clandestine activities of the CIA.

As part of his divorce agreement, AMES promised to pay the debts they had accumulated as a couple, in addition to passing a monthly alimony to their ex.

Ames's economic problems grew, aggravated by the expensive tastes of his new wife, her fans for compulsive purchases and his frequent calls to his family in Colombia.

Later he would say to the Senator of Arizona, Dennis Deconcini, that it was his growing debts that led him to consider selling the secrets he had access to.

“I felt great financial pressure and, in retrospect, I was clearly exaggerating,” said Ames.

“It was about money, and I don't think he tried to make anyone believe that it was for something different,” FBI Agent Leslie G. Wiser said in 2015, who participated in the investigation that led to the arrest of AMES, to the Witness History of the BBC.

On April 16, 1985, after drinking drinks to arm himself with value, Ames entered directly into the Russian Embassy in Washington DC

Once inside, he gave the receptionist an envelope with the names of several double agents, documents that demonstrated their credentials as a member of the CIA and a note demanding $ 50,000.

In a Senate report, he would affirm that he initially believed that it was a unique agreement to get out of his financial quagmire, but soon realized that he had “crossed the line and could never back down.”

During the next nine years, AMES was paid to pass a lot of ultrasecreta information to the KGB. He carried classified documents – which detailed everything, from listening devices connected to the Moscow space facilities to avant -garde technology capable of counting the nuclear eyelets of the Soviet missiles -, wrapped them in plastic bags and simply took them out of the CIA.

Since its function involved official meetings with Russian diplomats, it could often meet face to face with its contacts without raising suspicions. He also left packages of documents classified at secret and preset delivery points.

“If I was going to make a mail deposit, before it made a brand with chalk in a mailbox, for example, and the Russians saw it and then knew that the deposit was full of documents,” Wiser said. “Later, when recovering the documents, they deleted the brand. Then they knew that the transfer of documents had been carried out safely.”

Thanks to the filtration of secret intelligence information by AMES, the KGB identified virtually all the spies of the CIA in the Soviet Union, thus dismantling the Understood operations of the United States in the area.

“I don't know any other spy or mole in the United States that has caused so many human losses,” Wiser said.

The sudden disappearance of so many agents of the CIA unleashed the alarm and triggered the search for the mole within the agency in 1986, but Ames would continue to go unnoticed for almost a decade.

And he received a generous compensation for his betrayal, receiving a total of approximately US $ 2.5 million from the Soviet Union.

Ames barely tried to hide his new wealth. Despite not having a salary greater than US $ 70,000 annually, he bought a new house of US $ 540,000 in cash, spent tens of thousands of dollars on improvements and bought a jaguar.

His luxurious lifestyle and expenses would put him in the spotlight and lead him to his arrest for the Wiser FBI team in 1994.

After being arrested by the FBI, Ames cooperated with the authorities. He detailed the scope of his espionage activities in exchange for an agreement with the Prosecutor's Office that allowed him to obtain an indulgent sentence for Casas, who admitted to knowledge of money and his meetings with the Soviets.

She was released after five years. But Ames, the highest rank officer of the CIA who has been discovered as a double agent, continues to fulfill life imprisonment in a US federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

To this day, AMES has shown very little remorse for its acts or for the deaths it caused.

“He had very high self -esteem,” Wiser said about Ames. “He regrets having been caught. He doesn't regret being spy.”

Subscribe here To our new newsletter to receive every Friday a selection of our best content of the week.

And remember that you can receive notifications in our app. Download the latest version and act.