Aldrich Hazen Ames (/eɪmz/; born May 26, 1941)[2][3] is an American former CIA counterintelligence officer who was convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union and Russia in 1994.

Carleton received a "particularly negative performance appraisal" in part because of serious alcoholism, and spent the remainder of his career at CIA headquarters in Langley.

Ames was responsible for marking classified documents for filing as well as making fake money to be used in training programs for "the Farm", where CIA trainees began.

Returning to the Washington metropolitan area, Ames took full-time employment at the CIA doing the same sort of clerical jobs he had performed in high school.

When asked to elaborate on the offense, Ames confessed that he and a friend not affiliated with CIA, while drunk, stole a delivery boy's bicycle and went joyriding.

Ames was assigned to Ankara, Turkey, and Nancy then resigned from the CIA because of a rule that prohibited married partners from working from the same office.

He succeeded in infiltrating the communist Dev-Genç organization through a roommate of student activist Deniz Gezmiş and a beauty pageant contestant whose boyfriend was participating in a movement to overthrow the Turkish government.

His superiors considered the spies recruited to be of sufficient value, but a remark was made that Ames was "unsuited for field work and it is recommended he spend the remainder of his career at CIA headquarters".

[12] In 1972, Ames returned to CIA headquarters, where he spent the next four years in the Soviet-East European (SE) Division, where he was responsible for managing assets and his skills were better utilized.

His inattention to detail also led him to commit two security violations, including once leaving a briefcase containing classified operational materials on the New York City Subway, which the FBI recovered and determined as being uncompromised.

In October 1982, Ames began an affair with María del Rosario Casas Dupuy [es], a cultural attaché in the Colombian embassy and a CIA informant.

At a diplomatic reception in Mexico City, Ames got into a loud, drunken argument with a Cuban official that "caused alarm" among his superiors.

[16] In October, he formally separated from Nancy; in November, he submitted an "outside activity" report to the CIA, noting his romantic relationship with Rosario.

As part of his divorce settlement from his first wife, Ames agreed to pay the debts that they had accrued and provide Nancy monthly support for three and a half years, totaling approximately $46,000.

After her arrest, the FBI discovered 60 purses in the Ames' house, more than five hundred pairs of shoes, 165 unopened boxes of pantyhose and multiple designer dresses, noting "at least a dozen looked like they were not yet worn".

Ames routinely assisted another CIA office that assessed Soviet embassy officials as potential intelligence assets.

[19] Ames later claimed that he had not prepared for more than the initial "con game" to satisfy his immediate indebtedness but having "crossed a line" he "could never step back".

[22] One CIA officer said that the Soviets "were wrapping up our cases with reckless abandon", which was highly unusual because the "prevailing wisdom among the Agency's professional 'spy catchers'" was that suddenly eliminating all the assets known to the mole would put him in danger.

In fact, Ames' KGB handlers apologized to him, saying they disagreed with that course of action, but that the decision to immediately eliminate all American assets had been made at the highest political levels.

Understanding that his new wealth would raise eyebrows, he developed a cover story that his prosperity was the result of money given to him by his Colombian wife's wealthy family.

[25] In mid-May 1985, someone apparently reported to the Soviets that Oleg Gordievsky, their chief of station in London, was sending secrets to MI6, which he had been doing, under great secrecy, for 11 years.

Regardless, from 1990 to 1991, he was reassigned to the CIA's Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group, which provided him with access to "extremely sensitive data", including information on American double agents.

[21] Prior to that, in November 1989, a fellow employee reported that Ames seemed to be enjoying a lifestyle well beyond the means of a CIA officer, and that his wife's family was less wealthy than he had claimed.

Worthen, one of the members of the mole hunt team, knew Rosario prior to her marriage and had met with her one day to discuss installing drapes in the Ames residence.

[43] It is estimated that information Ames provided to the Soviets led to the compromise of at least 100 American intelligence operations and the execution of at least ten sources.

[21] There was a "huge uproar" in Congress when CIA Director James Woolsey decided that no one in the agency would be dismissed or demoted in relation to Ames' espionage.

Bagley's source for his statement was "Aleksandr Kouzminov, Biological Espionage: Special Operations in the Soviet and Russian Foreign Intelligence Services in the West, (London: Greenhill Books, 2005), p.

"[67] In Spy Wars itself, Bagley goes into great detail explaining why he believed Vitaly Yurchenko, whom Ames allegedly betrayed, was a Kremlin-loyal false defector all along.