21. The Spook Who Decided to Exploit the CIA for Money
Worse for Tolkachev was Aldrich Ames. The son of a CIA analyst, Ames’ connections got him into the CIA in 1962. Ames was an alcoholic who had drunken run-ins with the police, drunken brawls in public with foreign diplomats, and was so sloppy that he once forgot secret documents in an NYC subway car. None of that stopped his steady rise within the CIA’s ranks. He recruited Soviet spies in Turkey in the 1960s, returned to the US in the 1970s, then was posted to Mexico in the early 1980s. There, he met his second wife, a Colombian whom he had recruited. They wed in 1985, and that same year, the couple began to sell secrets to the KGB.
By the time they were finally unmasked in 1994, Ames and his wife had been paid over $2.7 million by the KGB and its Russian successor. There had been warning signs aplenty, as the couple flouted the proceeds of their treason with conspicuous consumption and extravagant spending. A big $520,000 house paid for in cash, luxury vacations, premium credit cards whose minimum monthly payments exceeded Ames’ salary, and luxury cars that stood out in the CIA’s parking lot. Those were things that no honest public servant could afford on government pay.
