Double agents have been part of statecraft for thousands of years.
Their value in confusing the opponent and dismantling the enemy’s spy network within your country was recognised as early as 2,500 years ago.
In the 5th century BC, Sun Tzu advised in his famous treatise on war and statecraft to spend liberally to recruit double agents.
“The enemy’s spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away, and comfortably housed. Thus, they will become double agents and available for our service,” Sun Tzu wrote in his ‘The Art of War.’
Throughout history, there have been many famous double agents who singlehandedly tried to change the course of history.
However, perhaps the most famous double agent in the annals of espionage was Mata Hari.
An exotic dancer and courtesan, she was executed by France in 1917 for spying for Germany during the First World War.
Similarly, during the Second World War, Juan Pujol García (codename GARBO) made a name for himself through his daring exploits. A Spanish businessman, he convinced Nazi officials that he was spying for Germany, though in reality he was an MI6 agent. The Germans were so convinced of his loyalty that they awarded him the Iron Cross.
His most famous mission was to convince the German High Command that the D-Day invasion would hit Calais rather than Normandy, thus helping preserve the surprise of the actual landing and contributing directly to the success of the Allied forces in the Second World War.
Kim Philby was another high-profile double agent during the Cold War. The most notorious of the Cambridge Five, he was a high-ranking MI6 officer who spied for the Soviet Union for decades, betraying countless Western spies and operations.
Some of these double agents were inspired by patriotism, and some by ideology. They also stand out for their uncommon backgrounds: an exotic dancer, a successful businessman, and a Cambridge scholar.
Compared to this illustrious pedigree, Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer who became a Soviet mole and died in a Maryland prison on January 7 at the age of 84, stands out for his banal life and mundane inspiration.
He was not guided by ideology or patriotism, but by greed alone. Ames passed highly sensitive information about CIA operations and agents behind the Iron Curtain, first to the Soviets and then to the Russians, between 1985 and 1994.
He once described his actions as guided simply by a toxic cocktail of vodka, arrogance, delusions of grandeur, and naked greed.
However, not withstanding his unassuming lifestyle, Ames will still be remembered as one of the most murderous turncoats in the history of the CIA, who singlehandedly jeopardised CIA operations and agents in Russia.
The CIA Agent Who Sold Secrets To The Soviets
Ames was the son of a mediocre, alcoholic CIA agent who was briefly posted in Burma.
After dropping out of college, Ames landed a job with the CIA as a clerk, thanks to his father’s contacts.
He married his first wife, fellow CIA agent Nancy Segebarth, in 1969, before being sent to Turkey as a counterintelligence officer to recruit foreign agents.
However, Ames was a disappointment to his station chief in Ankara, who wrote him up as unfit for the life of a spy overseas and best suited for a desk job far behind the front lines of the Cold War.
By 1972, he was back in the US, where his problems with alcohol began to emerge, and his marriage began to collapse.
Apparently, the not-so-flattering report written by Ankara station chief was not the only red flag in Ames’s career.
He once left a briefcase with highly sensitive documents on a train, potentially exposing a Soviet diplomat working for the C.I.A. He was caught for drunken-driving and once had a near-brawl at an embassy reception. His station chief recommended a medical leave for Ames due to his alcoholism.
However, as fate would have it, all these red flags were ignored by the C.I.A Headquaters.
To push-start his stalled career at the CIA, Ames learned Russian and joined the C.I.A.’s Soviet division.
In 1982, he was sent to Mexico, which was then a hub of Soviet intelligence operations.
Returning to the US in 1983, Ames became head of the CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence department, despite continuing concerns over his alcohol problem.
During this time, he started dating Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, a cultural attaché at the Colombian embassy and a CIA asset. Ames later married Rosario.
Ames was paying monthly support to his first wife and supporting Rosario’s lifestyle, which was slowly pushing him into debt.
On April 16, 1985, while assigned to the CIA’s Soviet/East European Division at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he secretly volunteered to KGB officers at the USSR Embassy, Washington, D.C.
Ames gave the Soviets the names of a few KGB officers secretly working for the FBI. Shortly thereafter, the KGB paid him US$50,000.
During the summer of 1985, Ames met several times with a Russian diplomat to whom he passed classified information about CIA and FBI human sources, as well as technical operations targeting the Soviet Union. In December 1985, Ames met with a Moscow-based KGB officer in Bogota, Colombia. In July 1986, Ames was transferred to Rome, Italy.
In Rome, Ames continued his meetings with the KGB, including a Russian diplomat assigned in Rome and a Moscow-based KGB officer. At the conclusion of his assignment in Rome, Ames received instructions from the KGB regarding clandestine contacts in the Washington, D.C. area, where he would next be assigned.
In addition, the KGB wrote to Ames that it had paid him US$1.88 million over the four years since he volunteered.
Upon his return to Washington, D.C. in 1989, Ames continued to pass classified documents to the KGB.
In the meantime, the CIA and FBI learned that Soviet officials who had been recruited by them were being arrested and executed one by one. As many as 10 Soviet and Soviet-bloc spies were arrested, interrogated, and executed for treason. One was imprisoned.
In a span of a few years, almost all CIA assets in the KGB were exposed. The CIA was getting convinced that there was a mole among them.
In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved. However, Ames would continue to pass sensitive information about CIA operations and agents to Russia.
In total, he compromised more than 100 clandestine operations and divulged the identities of more than 30 agents spying for the West, leading to the deaths of at least 10 CIA intelligence assets. In return, he received over US$2.7 million from the KGB.
Meanwhile, the CIA and the FBI received anonymous complaints about Ames’s lavish lifestyle. He had bought an expensive house (US$540,000), gone on foreign holidays, and bought a Jaguar car, a lifestyle that was difficult to fund on his salary, which never exceeded US$70,000 a year.
The FBI tracked his movements for nearly 10 months before finally arresting him in February 1994.
At the time of his arrest, Ames was a 31-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who had been spying for the Russians since 1985. Arrested with him was his wife, Rosario Ames, who had aided and abetted his espionage activities.
Ames and his wife both pleaded guilty on April 28, 1994. Ames was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Rosario was sentenced to 63 months in prison.
The CIA director at the time, R. James Woolsey said the agents Ames betrayed died because a “murdering traitor wanted a bigger house and a Jaguar.”
“It was about the money, and I don’t think he ever really tried to lead anybody to believe it was anything more than that,” FBI agent Leslie G Wiser, who was involved in the investigation that led to Ames’s arrest, told the BBC in 2015.
In the annals of the spy world, there have been many double agents, but Ames stands out for his unremarkable background and for being guided solely by greed.
- Sumit Ahlawat has over a decade of experience in news media. He has worked with Press Trust of India, Times Now, Zee News, Economic Times, and Microsoft News. He holds a Master’s Degree in International Media and Modern History from the University of Sheffield, UK.
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