Aldrich Ames is considered the greatest traitors in the history of America’s intelligence. His arrest came on the 21 st of February, 1994. The amounts of money he was receiving is what betrayed him. His story is an interesting one. Ames had joined the CIA 32 years before his arrest as a low-level staffer. His efforts moved him up the ladder and in 1969, he was made a case officer. He divorced his wife in the 80s and got another girlfriend who seemed to have an expensive taste.
In 1985, Ames was in the capital city and managed to meet with some members of the Soviet Embassy to which he offered to give CIA secrets in exchange for cash. Since he had access to all cases handled by the CIA, information such as CIA penetration and the intelligence that the CIA had on the Soviet military were all sold. The meetings became regular as the summer of that year approached. The CIA then realized that most of its operations were failing and its spies were being killed. A task force was formed to investigate this.
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After investigating for five years, the task force began looking for a mole in the CIA. It came up with a list of 190 officers that were to be investigated (Ferran, 2019) . An elimination process was consequently done and the list was cut down to 28 officers. The members of the task force were then asked to list down six members that were under investigation and that posed high risks of infiltrating the CIA and Aldrich Ames’ name came on top of all of them. It was then realized that Ames’ accounts were constantly deposited with large amounts of money every time he met with members of the Soviet Union. The FBI then focused the investigations on Ames and in 1994, he was arrested for spying.
References
Ferran, L. (2019, March 5). How the CIA Caught One of the Worst Russian Spies in History . Retrieved from Inside Hook: https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/cia-caught-one-worst-russian-spies-history
