Pod Insights John Kiriakou's Dead Drop Mini Episode 5 Betrayal About this episode THE BLURB: Aldrich Ames was a CIA counterintelligence officer who was convicted of espionage on behalf of the soviet Union and Russia in 1994. Ames was responsible for the arrest and eventual execution of numerous Soviet and Russian officials secretly working on behalf of US intellifence, and had compromised more highly classified CIA assets than any other intelligence officer at the time of his arrest. What caused Rich Ames to betray his craft and his country? Why does any spy go rogue?
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1:06 Speaker 02 This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.
1:16 John Kiriakou? Hi, I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop: What Makes a Spy Tick? In this mini-episode, we're going to ask a variation on that question. What makes a traitor tick? In this case, a traitor who also happened to be a spy. But before we get there, I want to thank you again for listening. It's appreciated more than you know, and it's appreciated even more when you subscribe to, like, review, rate, and share the podcast on whatever platform you happen to be listening to us. On April 16, 1985, a 31-year CIA counterintelligence officer named Aldrich Hazen Ames walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC, and he betrayed America.
1:59 John Kiriakou? He offered the Soviets the identities of two KGB double agents who worked at the Soviet Embassy in Washington and who had been recruited by the CIA. In return, the Soviets gave Ames $50,000. That was to start. Over the next nine years, Ames became the most damaging KGB mole in US history and would receive more than $2 million from his Soviet spy masters. The result of his various betrayals was truly catastrophic, starting with the two double agents who were both executed. The operational secrets, plans, and protocols that Ames sold to the Soviets gave them deep insight into how we reacted and what we thought about them.
2:42 John Kiriakou? That crippled us against the Soviets for a period of years. But Kolokol, the Bell, as Ames was known to his Soviet handlers, was especially destructive to American human intelligence assets. Ames ultimately confessed to identifying more than thirty agents and compromised over a hundred clandestine operations. At least ten US intelligence sources were executed as a direct result of Aldrich Ames' treachery. We're talking about Ames today in this mini-episode because he just died at age eighty-four at the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Cumberland, Maryland. At least Kim Philby, perhaps the most damaging mole in British spying history, was driven
3:27 John Kiriakou? by a passionate belief in communism. He felt genuine contempt for British imperialism. Ames, on the other hand, did it purely for his "greed and folly, as simple as that." Talk about the banality of evil, and banal was a word that Ames himself used to describe what he did. Still, there was always another player in Ames's history. That was alcohol. Ames's father was an alcoholic, and so was Ames, like too, too many CIA officers. But Ames was worse than most. His drunken escapades were notorious, but they were tolerated, even though a supervisor
4:07 John Kiriakou? once described Ames as "one of the worst drunks in the outfit." Not only was Ames's father an alcoholic, he was also a CIA officer. He was an analyst who helped Ames get his first job at the agency despite the fact that Ames was a college dropout. Alcoholism stalled the career of Ames's dad, and in time, alcohol would leave a permanent mark on Aldrich Ames's record, too. His first overseas posting was to Ankara, Turkey, in the late 1960s. Ames was tasked with recruiting foreign agents. But his unhappy superiors back at Langley just didn't think he was cut out for fieldwork. They recalled him to Washington, sent him on a course to learn Russian,
4:52 John Kiriakou? and then put him to work supporting operations against suspected Soviet spies in Washington and New York. In 1972, another CIA officer stumbled upon Ames and a female CIA employee drunkenly engaging in sex, at the office, no less, which I hate to tell you is far more common than you might think. In 1976, Ames famously left a briefcase stuffed with classified information on the subway. His attitude toward work was described as "lackadaisical." Yet Ames continued to fail upward. In 1981, the agency sent him to Mexico to recruit Soviet officials as agents.
5:34 John Kiriakou? There, Ames had little success, but he did continue to engage in extramarital affairs. That included violating agency regulations by beginning an affair with a Colombian cultural attache who had been recruited to work for the CIA. Her name was Maria Del Rosario Casas de Puig. Despite this less-than-stellar performance, Ames continued to fail upwards. Upon his return to the agency's headquarters in 1983, he was actually promoted and made chief of the Soviet Operations Counterintelligence Branch. Imagine that. At this point, Ames was still doing his job poorly, but at least he wasn't betraying anything
6:19 John Kiriakou? other than his marriage.
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7:00 John Kiriakou? Ames's marriage to fellow CIA officer Nancy Segbarth collapsed for good when Ames brought his Colombian side hustle Rosario to America. He brought her mother along with him. Ames and Rosario got married, and that's when things seemed to have changed for him. Rosario and her mother had a taste for high living, which quickly put Ames deep in debt. Quote, "I felt a great deal of financial pressure, which in retrospect, I was clearly overreacting to," unquote. That's what Ames would later tell Arizona Senator Dennis DeCincini, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. In April 1985, Ames devised what he thought was "a clever plan," those again were his words, "to sell the KGB
7:45 John Kiriakou? some limited information for $50,000 to pay off his debts." That was the whole plan going in. But Ames realized quickly that he'd already crossed the line, and there was no going back. And so he doubled down and tripled down on his betrayal. And that's how the worst mole in US history got rolling. What really is a central question to the Aldrich Ames story is, how in the hell did he avoid detection for two decades? Well, there actually were reasons. One had to do with the CIA's culture at the time. A fear of moles had tormented various CIA directors and deputy directors, most famously Deputy Director for Counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton.
8:28 John Kiriakou? That created a kind of counterreaction. A lot of people inside The CIA were just exhausted by this constant hunt for moles. On top of that, the Directorate of Operations, that's the elite within the elite, rejected as unthinkable the very idea that there could be a mole in the CIA. This culture of misplaced secrecy covered for its brethren regardless of their errors, failures, misdemeanors, and outright crimes. On top of that, when in 1986 Ames told the KGB that he feared becoming a suspect, when the mole hunt eventually began again, the KGB threw US investigators off of Ames' trail by constructing an elaborate diversion.
9:10 John Kiriakou? A Soviet case officer told a CIA contact that the mole was actually stationed at something called the Warrenton Training Center, WTC. That was a secret CIA communications facility in Warrenton, Virginia. Taking the bait, mole hunters investigated 90 employees at WTC for almost a year. They came up with 10 possible suspects, although the lead investigator noted that, quote, "There are so many problem personalities that no single one stands out," unquote. It wasn't so much the agency's work that eventually outed Ames as it was Ames's own complete stupidity, but then greed has never made anyone smarter.
9:51 John Kiriakou? The FBI placed Ames under surveillance, and on February 21st, 1994, he and Rosario were both arrested at their home in Arlington, Virginia. Ames pleaded guilty two months later to providing highly classified information to the KGB and its successor, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. In return for a lenient sentence for his wife, Ames was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. Rosario got 63 months in prison, but served only four years before being released in 1998 and returning to Colombia, where their young son Paul was being cared for by his grandmother. Of course, I have my own thoughts about Rick Ames, and I'd like to share them with you.
10:35 John Kiriakou? I've long been personally opposed to the death penalty, but not in the case of Aldrich Ames. Ames's treachery resulted in the deaths of at least 12 people. I would consider him to be akin to a serial killer. Or a mass murderer, someone who's just so dangerous to society that he has to be done away with. In addition to the crimes that he committed directly, Ames's treachery led to another mole. Harold Nicholson was an officer in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. He was a colleague of mine. He had been passed over for promotion and was angry. He believed that he wasn't appreciated.
11:18 John Kiriakou? Well, this is right around the time that Ames was caught, and Nicholson foolishly came to the conclusion that, well, the KGB's mole was caught, they'll be looking for another mole. And so he flew overseas, walked into the Russian Embassy, said, "I'm a senior CIA officer and I want to work for the KGB." And he outed more than 200 CIA officers, including me. As I said earlier, we're doing this episode because Aldrich Ames just died, but it would be wrong if we didn't mark another passing at the same time. Back during the summer, on July 25th, 2025, Sandra Grimes died. Sandy was a key part of the team that caught Ames.
12:01 John Kiriakou? A CIA officer with a long and very distinguished career, Sandy correlated the times that Ames met with Sergey Chuvakin, his KGB handler, with the times that he then made large bank deposits in 1985 and 1986. She was the first one to ask, "How can a man who makes $70,000 a year, live in a $2 million house, drive a Jaguar, and then brag around the office that he's installed a built-in pool and a gazebo?" Grimes had suspected early on that Ames was a mole, but the deposits proved, she said, that Ames was, as she put it, "a goddamn Russian spy." She took Ames's crimes personally.
12:46 John Kiriakou? GRU Colonel Dmitry Poliakov, who was an agent of hers, was one of the assets burned by Ames. In early 1993, Sandy resigned from the CIA. Till next time, don't forget to like, rate, review, and share the podcast, and please check out my other podcasts, Deep Focus and Deep Program. You can find them on YouTube and Rumble. I'm John Kiriakou. Thanks for listening.
13:12 John Kiriakou? Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costard and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.
13:33 Speaker 02 This podcast, it's a Costard and Touchstone production.
13:38 John Kiriakou? If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the Photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this: Just the Photographer will put you right there, on the ground, right next to David. Inside his head, in fact.
14:22 John Kiriakou? It's a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows? Your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now, back to Dead Drop.
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