• • Last year, on Groundhog’s Day, I found myself in the Military District of Washington for some work. I was staying across the river from the district in Arlington. I was staying with my friend the Commodore and his family. The Commodore is a generous host, I get along quite well with his wife and his son calls me Uncle Bob for reasons still unclear to us but hilarious nonetheless. We were out in Arlington running some errands and walking the dog when the Commodore asked me if I’d like to see Aldrich Ames’ house. He grew up around here, knows all the ins and outs. Of course, I said. We steered over that way. Did I want to see the Aldrich Ames house? Of course I did. Ames has been a special interest of mine since he got arrested on February 21, 1994. OLD FRIENDS WONDER WHICH IS REAL ALDRICH AMES They remember him as brash and brilliant back then, a slightly geeky boy who hid behind his rapier wit and dramatic flair. He performed in play after play at McLean (Va.) High School, including the class production of “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” But the Class of ‘59 never dreamed that Ricky Ames someday might make his own deal with the devil, becoming what investigators now describe as one of the most ruthless double-agents in U.S. intelligence history. -Roanoke Times, 1995 (https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1994/rt9402/940227/02270103.htm) • • Ames lived in a nice house on a quiet street a few minutes drive from CIA headquarters. We observed it, tried to picture the Jaguar in the driveway, and then moved on. Down the street was S.S. Smile, the code name for the mailbox Ames would leave a mark on whenever he’d filled or emptied a dead drop. Thirty years after the arrest of Aldrich Ames in the front yard, handcuffed while draped over his Jaguar, the house still stood for occasional tourists to gawk at.

In 1994 my family had just moved back to the United States from Bitburg, Germany, where my dad was the Air Force Public Health Officer on Langley Air Force Base. We moved to Yorktown, Virginia, first down in Tabb near Poquoson and then in Yorktown near the proper; our house was a brick colonial, built in the tidewater forest where George Washington’s light infantry made camp during the Siege of Yorktown in 1871. I could run to the battlefields from my house. I could also walk to the library.
I was a weird kid, and CIA’s training base at Camp Peary was just up Colonial Parkway from my house and high school, past the Naval Station where Marines guarded the Navy’s nuclear weapons. Naturally in eighth grade I got it in my head to go to the library and make xerox copies of passages from books and articles about CIA, (what for? Why, for my files, of course, I’d answer—files which I still have in a file cabinet). Of course, given the time and place, Aldrich Ames was everywhere. This was an interesting period in the 1990s, one must recall. The Director of CIA, James Woolsey, was not popular with President Clinton and while William Casey in the Reagan administration held essentially a cabinet level post, Woolsey had trouble even getting an appointment with the President. As Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger explained to then University of Virginia historian Tim Naftali for the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Project: (https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-histories/samuel-r-berger-oral-history) [Laughter] I don’t think that was a good fit. Of course Jim leaves the scene after about a year. The CIA Director has to be somebody who is analytically impartial. We’ve run into problems recently where that’s not been the case. Jim’s an advocate, a lawyer, a litigator. He’ll fight you about a comma. There were a lot of jokes made about Woolsey never getting to see the President. When the plane crashed into the White House, the joke was that it was Jim Woolsey was trying to get in to see the President. It was much deeper than that. I think there was a feeling that Jim was too rigid, and that what he was giving us was not so much the analytical assessment of the intelligence community as it was the world according to Jim Woolsey, and there just wasn’t a good personality fit between Woolsey and Clinton.
Woolsey was CIA Director when Ames was arrested, further isolating him from the White House. The Ames arrest was not a comfortable moment for the Agency. They’d managed—for the most part—to pin the blame for the 1985 losses of CIA assets in the Soviet Union on Edward Lee Howard. I covered Howard’s story here, in this dispatch: Howard was, in many ways, a convenient scapegoat for CIA’s 7th Floor. Howard was a young, inexperienced officer who blew a gasket after he was fired. He was from a blue collar, southwestern military pedigree and he’d been dismissed—after fluttering a polygraph—before embarking on his first overseas tour. Easy to say he was just a bad apple, sometimes those get through. Plus, the KGB was gone, replaced with what would eventually be called the SVR. The Soviet Union had fallen. The idea of a Russian mole in 1994? A psychologically crippling blow to the Agency the likes of which it would not feel again until September, 2001. Aldrich Hazen Ames was another story altogether to spin. His father, Carleton Cecil Ames, was also a CIA Officer, from Wisconsin, with a PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He was also a serious alcoholic who had one overseas tour in Burma and then spent the rest of his career riding a desk in Northern Virginia. He worked under James Angleton for a brief period of time, then died of cancer at age 62, but not before his son secured employment with the Agency. The irony of a man who worked for Angleton—obsessed with moles—having a son who would become a mole was not lost on anyone, least of all Aldrich Ames. The Senate Intelligence Committee report featured an interview (https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-filesations-10390.pdf) with Ames, who had this to say about Angleton: “Angleton wouldn’t have known what to do with a mole if it bit him in the leg” Help support this important work, subscribe today

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       (https://thehuntfortomclancy.substack.com/p/aldrich-ames-and-ss-smile)