20. A Slimy Spook
Aldrich Ames (1941 – ) was a Central Intelligence Agency official who rose high in the agency’s Soviet and East European division, which afforded him access to Soviet counterintelligence. A slimy figure from early on, he turned traitor and sold his services to the KGB as a deep mole within their enemy’s camp. Ames became one of the USSR’s, and later Russia’s, most effective double agents in the US. The son of a CIA analyst, Ames’ connections paved the way for his joining the CIA in 1962. Those connections also kept him in the Agency despite problematic behavior that should have gotten him canned early on, long before he inflicted so much damage. Among other things, Ames was a heavy drinker. His alcohol-related problems included drunken run-ins with cops and drunken brawls in public with foreign diplomats.
He was also negligent and sloppy. On one occasion, he forgot secret documents in an NYC subway car. None of that stopped him from rising steadily through the CIA’s ranks. After a stint in Turkey in the 1960s, Ames returned to the US in the 1970s, then was posted to Mexico in the early 1980s. There, he met his second wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, a Colombian whom he had recruited. They wed in 1985, and that same year, the couple began selling secrets to the KGB. By the time they were caught in 1994, Ames and his wife were paid over $2.7 million by the Soviets and Russians.
