AMES: SEPARATED SPY, AGENT LIVES (original) (raw)

”Financial troubles, immediate and continuing,” Aldrich H. Ames said matter-of-factly, were what led him to spy for the Soviet Union and kept him at it for nine years until the moment of his arrest in February.

But money, he said, was not the only factor that allowed him to justify to himself what would become the worst security loss to the CIA in its 47-year history.

In a 90-minute interview at the Alexandria jail Wednesday morning, Ames calmly attributed his ability to undertake what prosecutors described as ”a crime that caused people to die” to a mentality that was shaped long before he began his work for the Soviets. He has been in the spy and counterspy business for 31 years, usually living a public life as a State Department official and a private one as a CIA operative.

That dual existence, Ames said, long ago forced him to ”compartment” his mind.

Asked how he could sell sensitive secrets, given his loyalty oaths, his feelings about his country, the futures of his wife and son, Ames leaned back and replied: ”I tend to put some of these things in separate boxes, and compartment feelings and thoughts.”

He was still, he said, mulling over a thought process that he repeatedly mused was ”hard to . . . articulate.” But his conclusions thus far do not appear to include grief or contrition for the fact that his information apparently led to the deaths of at least four Soviets working secretly for the United States.

In his mind, Ames said, he and each of the Soviets he exposed were in the same game and ran the same risks as traitors to their own countries.

The interview with Ames took place in a small, sealed room at the jail, furnished only with a round plastic table and chairs.

Throughout his years of spying for the Soviets, Ames said, he was never afraid he would be detected by the CIA or FBI. The danger in his mind, he said, came from Soviet defectors.

”Initially, my only fear was that a KGB officer knowledgeable of my relationship with the KGB would defect or volunteer to us. . . . Virtually every American who has been jailed in connection with espionage has been fingered by a Soviet sources,” he said.

Ames dismissed the polygraphs he regularly was given as a CIA employee as ”witch-doctory.” ”There’s no special magic” in passing lie detector tests, he shrugged. ”Confidence is what does it. Confidence and a friendly relationship with the examiner… rapport, where you smile and you make him think that you like him.”

Nor did he have difficulty explaining to the agency where he got the money the Soviets were paying him, a total of $2.5 million over the years, according to prosecutors. He was never asked, Ames said.

Ames clearly took pride in what he offered the Soviets.

He said Wednesday that at the time he planned selling the first secrets in 1985, he was ”one of the most knowledgeable people in the intelligence community on the Russian intelligence service. And my access to information and my knowledge of the Soviets was such that I could get virtually anything I wanted.”

What he considered his access and ability, Ames believed, ”also gave me the confidence and the ability, I thought, to have a brief relationship with them. And to control what I gave them, the information that would not do any damage.”

Now due to spend the rest of his life in prison, Ames already has had a lot of time to rationalize what he did.

While he freely acknowledges his need and desire for money, he also offers a complex and somewhat tortured explanation that has little to do with payment, or with loyalty to one country or another.

”When I said there was this strange transfer of loyalties,” he explained, ”it wasn’t to the Soviet system, which I believe was a beastly, inhuman, nasty regime. It was indeed to the kinds of things that were happening.”

His loyalty, as he described it, was to a way of life, and a world he considered above the petty concerns of governments.

DETAILS

(From: The Associated Press)

Excerpts from the statement read in court Thursday by confessed spy Aldrich Ames:

”I bitterly regret the catastrophe which my betrayal of trust has brought upon my wife and son and upon any who have loved or cared for me. No punishment by this court can balance or ease the profound shame and guilt which I bear.”

Regarding his wife:”I successfully concealed my relationship with the KGB and SVRR (its Russian successor agency) from her for seven-and-a-half of the nine years of my criminal activity. When she learned of it through my careless mistake, that knowledge was devastating to her and to our marriage. … She pleaded with me to break off the relationship with the Russians. I was able to manipulate her, even to blackmail her, into delaying that action.”

”I am compelled by my desire to be honest with this court and with the public to assure you that, as an intelligence officer with more than thirty years’ experience, I do not believe that our nation’s interests have been noticeably damaged by my acts, or for that matter, those of the Soviet Union or Russia noticeably aided.”

Explaining why he volunteered to the KGB the names of virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and American and foreign services he knew of:

”First, I had come to dissent from the decades-long shift to the extreme right in our political spectrum and from our national security and foreign policies.

”Second, I had come to believe that the espionage business, as carried out by the CIA and a few other American agencies, was and is a self-serving sham, carried out by careerist bureaucrats who have managed to deceive several generations of American policymakers and the public about both the necessity and the value of their work.

”There is and has been no rational need for thousands of case officers and tens of thousands of agents working around the world, primarily in and against friendly countries.”

Originally Published: April 29, 1994 at 12:00 AM EDT