Aldrich Ames
If you’re being paid to spy on your country, you might want to keep a low profile, right? Well, Aldrich Ames didn’t. In fact, it was the CIA man’s ostentatiousness which led to his downfall. After all, his bosses at the Agency, reasoned: how could a man on a (relatively) modest salary afford a top-of-the-range Jaguar car? And how come he was living in a mansion that the CIA Director himself would be happy to call home? The answer, of course, was that he was selling secrets for cold, hard cash. The only really shocking thing about the whole affair was how inept he was about it. Well, that and how he was able to get away with it for almost a decade.
Born in River Falls, Wisconsin, Ames was hardly a top scholar. But that didn’t stop him from joining the CIA. In fact, he started working for them in 1957, while still a sophomore at the University of Chicago. While he had big plans for his life, he got distracted from his studies and dropped out, choosing to work in a Chicago theatre for a couple of years before returning to the Agency to work full-time in menial clerical roles. After five years pushing paper, Ames went back to school. He graduated from George Washington University and then, to the surprise of some, was accepted onto the CIA’s Career Trainee Program. His spying career had begun – but so too had his career as a hard drinker.
Over the next few years, Ames bounced around the world. He worked in Turkey, then Washington and then New York City. His performances were consistently average at best and his superiors noted his thirst for whiskey with alarm. He even managed to get away with several sackable offences, including having an affair with a Colombian agent and even leaving a briefcase full of classified information on a subway train. He seemed untouchable. Could this be why, when he was moved to the Soviet Desk at CIA HQ in 1983, he decided to try and get rich? Or was he simply a desperate man, worried that divorcing his wife and taking up with the Colombian agent would bankrupt him?
Ames started off small. He sold essentially worthless information to the KGB for $50,000, establishing him with the Soviets. After this initial success, he arranged regular meetings with a KGB handler. He was paid $25,000 for each lunch meeting and is believed to have amassed $4.6 million in total. Soon, Ames was splashing the cash, claiming that his new Colombian wife came from a wealthy family. New, designer suits, cosmetic dentistry and constant home improvements made his colleagues and superiors suspicious. And, even though Ames passed two polygraph tests, his time was up. The CIA put him under round-the-clock surveillance and soon got enough to charge him with treason.
Ames may have been bungling, but he was far from harmless. His betrayals led to at least ten agents being uncovered and executed. That’s why, in 1994, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.