For now, let us stick with the official version; the one given to the public after Ames' arrest. In 1985,Ames, now the head of CIA's counterintelligence, was in financial difficulty. He was recently divorced and had to pay alimony to his ex-wife, while Maria del Rosario on the other hand, who had now ceased working for the CIA, hated living frugally. Ames had to somehow think of a way to get more money, even later saying after his conviction that he had thought about robbing a bank.
And so one day in April 1985, he simply walked up to the Soviet embassy and asked to speak with the head of the KGB's branch in Washington. The resident, as they are known, was obviously an agent with diplomatic cover and when introduced, Ames explained that he was willing to betray his country for money, lots of money. As a pledge, he offered the KGB agent the names of three Soviet double agents who had passed on information to the CIA. The Russian understood the value of the information and in return, immediately gave Ames a few thousand dollars and the two men agreed to quickly establish further contact, with the promise that Ames would be paid handsomely for any further information provided.
Ames quietly exited the embassy, regardless of the presence of the FBI cameras and several further appointments followed, which took place at a fashionable restaurant in Washington. Prudently, the KGB chief sent a junior agent, even though, according to the official version given after Ames' arrest, the American never showed any particular discretion at the meetings: whenever Ames was due to meet with his case officer, he would just shove all the original documents that he wanted to hand over in a plastic bag, without even taking the precaution of making photocopies, before quietly leaving the office, jumping in his car, and leaving Langley with all the classified documents on the seat next to him. Upon delivering the information to the agent in the restaurant, he would be given his reward. And what a reward it was, amounting to several million dollars in all. When considering the parsimonious nature of the Soviets, this was a considerable amount that surely must have justified the importance of the information handed over.
Some of his colleagues in the CIA began to ask questions, but Ames always had the answers: his wife had inherited a legacy and he had made several very successful investments with the money. The tax office was naturally hardly satisfied with such explanations, but Ames somehow managed to slip through the net and until his arrest, had no concerns at all about what he was doing.
Even more surprising was the attitude of the Soviets, who knew full-well that their mole might attract suspicion if he continued to randomly spend the money they were paying him. Yet his expensive lifestyle did not seem to worry them, nor did the manifest lack of judgement he continued to display. A clear example of this behaviour was uncovered after his arrest, when secret Pentagon papers containing the personal list of CIA agents was found in a box in his wardrobe. Worse still, the FBI agents also found a wealth of information stored on the hard drive of his computer. It was clear that the curious spy had kept hold of everything, evidently believing that he was untouchable!
Convinced of his own invulnerability, Aldrich Ames had managed to cause more damage than any other spy - a fact he was only too willing to boast about after his arrest, while at the same time showing no signs of remorse and even declaring himself as the spy of the century. However, such vanity does not quite match up with the real personality of the super-spy he claimed to be. In this business, discretion is the key and the greatest spies have never revealed their true identity. Would Rudolf Abel, or at least the man known by this name, have made such sensational statements? No. In this respect, the man who was the head of Soviet espionage in the United States throughout the 1940s and 1950s was silent on the subject, even after his arrest, and returned to the USSR with his secrets intact. Even the spies who published their autobiographies did so at the request of their superiors for propaganda reasons, while at the same time, carefully concealing all the most interesting details. As a result, there is something in the Ames case to suggest that he was not the quite the spy he claimed, or rather pretended, he was.
As the head of counterintelligence, Ames had access to the files of American agents who working in the USSR and other eastern countries. In other words, Soviet citizens who were working for the CIA. The American agency was certainly well endowed with a significant number of double agents: much more so than the KGB had in the US or other western countries. The time of disinterested spies who were working out of sympathy for the communist regime had long gone and the USSR of Brezhnev, Andropov or Chernenko was struggling to generate any enthusiasm for the cause. Forget about the idea of working for the honour of your country: agents now wanted to be paid and recruiting suitable candidates had become much more difficult and uncertain.
Yet thanks to Ames, the Soviets had the upper hand in the 1980s. He gave them names, and even if the names did not appear in full, he gave them enough detail about the agents in question to ensure
