“Afterward, we drove to a home in Virginia for a reception, where I met Joe,” Andrei told me in a conversation over lunch at a restaurant tucked away on a side street in Washington. But this Land Rover’s driveshaft had been rerouted through one of the vehicle’s doors, the former CIA officer says, so that Gordievsky could fold himself into the hump, in effect hiding in plain sight. While the extent of these ac-tivities was uncertain at that time, it was clear that Ames, an em-ployee of the CIA's Directorate of … She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. “The mole isn’t just some guy who stole a few secrets. He was convicted of espionage in 1994. He started having trouble breathing. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. Maria del Rosario Casas Ames, 41, wife of confessed spy Aldrich Hazen Ames, sits in a tiny, windowless, pale-green room at a Formica table in the Alexandria Detention Center. His boyhood nickname, back on a collective farm in Ukraine, was “Mole.” Now a stocky, powerfully built man of 43, he had been working for the GRU for 16 years—and feeding Soviet secrets to the CIA for 10. Bokhan’s son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. Born 1941 in River Falls, Wisconsin, the son of Carleton Ames, a teacher at River Falls State Teachers College and grandson of Jesse Ames, the president of the school.His mother was also a teacher. Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Magazine “Confess again!” the general roared. “Soon after his arrest she collapsed psychologically. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. CIA employee, Aldrich Hazen Ames, and his wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Ames, on charges stemming from espionage activi-ties allegedly undertaken since 1985. Childhood And Early Life. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. In extended CIA and FBI debriefings, he talked about his nine years of spying for Moscow—including the day when he turned over, in his words, the identities of “virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me.”. “No,” he was told, “they’re here for you.”. He was to stand on a certain Moscow street corner on a designated day and time until he saw a “British-looking” man who was eating something. Ames, the wife of convicted Central Intellience Agency turncoat Aldrich Ames, is … “Your father’s been arrested,” the man said. “They know.”. Directed by John Mackenzie. Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. Some days passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, drove him to a KGB dacha, saying some people wanted to talk to him. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. Inside were three British intelligence agents—the candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievsky’s MI6 case officer in London. “We had neighbors that were very close. Biography. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. Before Ames, there was Edward Lee Howard, a CIA officer who had been slated to go to Moscow but was fired instead for drug use and petty theft. He works as a computer programmer. Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. Menu. Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. See our, Read a limited number of articles each month, You consent to the use of cookies and tracking by us and third parties to provide you with personalized ads, Unlimited access to washingtonpost.com on any device, Unlimited access to all Washington Post apps, No on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking. I could sense he had been tortured.” Leonid was executed on July 30. In 1997, Andrei and Svetlana emigrated to the United States. They married in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he worked for an independent newspaper in Moscow for a time. Arrested with him was his wife, Rosario Ames, who had aided and abetted his espionage activities. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG (Оле́г Анто́нович Гордие́вский; born 10 October 1938) is a former colonel of the KGB and KGB resident-designate (rezident) and bureau chief in London, who was a double agent, providing information to the British Secret … This content is currently not available in your region. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. I had no job. Fact-based story about a 1990s espionage case that was chronicled as the worst case of espionage in U.S. history. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, An Assessment of the Aldrich H. Ames Espionage Case and Its Implications for U.S. Intelligence, November 1, 1994. Aldrich Ames was born in River Falls, Wisconsin, to Carleton Cecil Ames and Rachel Ames (née Aldrich).His father was a college lecturer at the Wisconsin State College-River Falls and his mother a high school English teacher. A few days after Oleg Gordievsky was recalled to Moscow, the KGB flew his wife, Leila, and their two daughters there, and he broke the unwelcome news that they would not be posted back to London. Ames’ arrest in 1994 explained many of the high level leaks that had plagued the United States. What neither the CIA nor Poleshchuk knew was that the “apartment” was a KGB operation. The mere belief that there’s another mole, whether correct or not, can cause chaos inside an intelligence agency. ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Rosario Ames, wife of convicted spy Aldrich Ames, was sentenced to 63 months in prison today, after begging a federal judge for mercy… It has to be small. “After many years, I understood him. From the day they talked, Wiser told me, “we believed it was important for us to consider the strong possibility that Gordievsky was compromised by someone within the U.S. intelligence community.”, Wiser acknowledges that Ames may have lied or been mistaken about the date—Ames has conceded that he drank heavily before his meetings with the KGB. Aldrich was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Ames’ mother, Rachel Aldrich Ames, taught in the Fairfax County public schools until retiring in 1969 and moving to North Carolina. €5 every 4 weeks or just €50 €20 for the first year, €7 every 4 weeks or just €70 €30 for the first year. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. Would she ever live in the West? Continue Either one of ours or theirs.”, When the FBI Spent Decades Hunting for a Soviet Spy on Its Staff. His MI6 handlers assured him they’d picked up no sign anything was wrong. CIA employee, Aldrich Hazen Ames, and his wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Ames, on charges stemming from espionage activi-ties allegedly undertaken since 1985. These things have to be run to ground.”. On September 21, 1985, Howard eluded FBI surveillance and escaped into the New Mexico desert with the help of his wife, Mary, and a pop-up dummy in his car’s passenger seat (a technique he had learned in CIA training). “The timeline just didn’t work” to explain Gordievsky’s recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. Ames was convicted of espionage and sentenced to life in prison, and his wife received a five-year sentence for tax evasion and conspiracy to commit espionage. For a long time he resented the impact of his father’s CIA spying on his own life. “Welcome to the United States,” one of them said. and C.I.A. 1941-1969 Aldrich Hazen ("Rick") Ames was born in River Falls, Wisconsin on May 26, 1941, to Carleton Ceil Ames and Rachel Aldrich Ames,Aldrich Ames was the oldest of three children and the only son. Cookie Policy He is currently serving a sentence, without the possibility of parole, in the high-security Allenwood U.S Penitentiary. In 1988, he took a Moscow river cruise and met “a blond, blue-eyed and very beautiful” woman named Svetlana, who worked for an automotive magazine. It was scary.”. It said his parents had unexpectedly heard of an apartment they could buy for him; his father decided to take his vacation early and come home to close the deal. Simpson and Lorena Bobbitt, move over, and make room for Rosario Ames. “I always thought there was another one,” he told me. Aldrich Ames is the CIA Chief of Soviet Counter-Intelligence for a long time, without having any promotion. There were, however, a number of leaks of information to which Ames was not privy (Ames was a CIA agent and did not have access to … His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. [Long pause.] “It was in my father’s handwriting.” Leonid Poleshchuk knew his first CIA case officer, who had recruited him in Nepal, as Joe. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. When I found a job, the KGB called and they fired me. Could Weirdly Straight Bolts of Lightning Be a Sign of Dark Matter? If I was waiting for the elevator, they went down the stairs. The following May, he was sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences behind bars with no possibility of parole. The KGB men searched the apartment all night. A large man let him in and flashed a badge. Accessed September 1, 2020, LINK. Prosecutors and defense attorneys for Aldrich and Rosario Ames are close to agreement on guilty pleas in the couple's espionage case, sources familiar with the … [Long pause.] Bokhan froze. Athens, May 21, 1985: After the Tuesday-morning staff meeting at the Soviet Embassy, Col. Sergei Ivanovich Bokhan stayed behind to talk to his boss, the local rezident of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. “They expected I would do something stupid,” he told me. By clicking “I agree” below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. In the history of U.S. intelligence, only three major moles—men whose betrayals had lethal results—have been identified. He drove across the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. and entered Chadwicks, a popular Georgetown restaurant, where he handed the documents to a Soviet Embassy official named Sergei Chuvakhin. Wise is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Politics of Lying, Spy Who Got Away and Tiger Trap. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close by—Alsatians, he later learned. The Soviets had arranged for the apparent good news to reach his wife through a friend and former co-worker in Moscow, who wrote to her in Lagos. The FBI declined to comment on whether the search Wiser began is continuing. Five days after Bokhan received the cable about his son, he took his wife, Alla, and their 10-year-old daughter, Maria, to the beach. Faced with these unexplained losses, the CIA in October 1986 set up a small, highly secret mole-hunting unit to uncover the cause of this disaster. As soon as Gordievsky landed in Moscow, he picked up signs that he had gambled wrong. On the front door of his apartment, someone had locked a third lock he never used because he had lost the key; he had to break in. In the late 1960s and 1970s, he works in Washington, New York and Turkey. You also agree to our Terms of Service. In April 1985, he has said, he told a Soviet contact in Washington the names of two or three double agents who had approached the CIA but who were actually working for the KGB—“dangles,” in intelligence parlance. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the British capital. Soon after they arrived in the United States, there was a ceremony honoring his father at a Russian Orthodox church in Washington. Plea Deal in Ames Spy Case Said to Hinge on Wife's Sentence Bill Miller and Walter Pincus - The Washington Post - April 23, 1994. The resettled spy told Wiser he was convinced Ames had betrayed him, but he confirmed that he had been abruptly summoned back to Moscow on May 17, 1985—almost four weeks before Ames said he named him to the KGB. 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