Hunting a Traitor: The CIA Team That Brought Down Aldrich Ames

 

Sandy Grimes: The CIA officer who helped bring down one of America's most dangerous traitors.

Aldrich Hazen Ames, a 31-year veteran of the CIA, turned out to be one of the most notorious double agents in American history. For nearly a decade, he bled U.S. intelligence dry, selling secrets to the Soviet Union from 1985 until his arrest by the FBI on February 21, 1994. It’s a story of betrayal, greed, and pure arrogance that cost the lives of some of America’s most vital assets during the Cold War.

     Ames wasn’t the kind of spy y
ou’d see in a Hollywood blockbuster. He was sloppy, disheveled, and oddly ordinary. He'd show up to work with his shirt untucked, driving an old Volvo with a stiff passenger window that never seemed to work. To those who knew him, he came across as just another CIA analyst. But behind that mundane appearance, Ames harbored a dangerous secret: he was selling out his country for cash.

     Ames was cold-blooded about his treachery. He wasn't peddling technical secrets or weapons blueprints—he was handing over the names of real people, Soviet assets who had risked everything to provide the U.S. with critical intelligence. In total, Ames exposed the identities of 50 Soviet intelligence officers working with the CIA. At least 10 of those brave souls were executed. In his mind, this wasn’t personal—just business. He even rationalized it, claiming that these agents knew the risks when they agreed to work for America. It was pure arrogance.

     So why did he do it? Simple: money. Ames pocketed at least $2.7 million from the KGB, more than any other U.S. traitor before him. To him, it was a solution to his financial woes. His lavish spending—luxury shopping trips to Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom for his wife, Rosario, who had quite the expensive taste—didn't go unnoticed. But the real damage was far greater than his personal greed. His betrayal left U.S. intelligence scrambling, and his Soviet handlers rewarded him handsomely for every name he handed over. 

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      But Ames wasn’t invincible, and his actions eventually raised suspicions. In the mid-1980s, the CIA noticed something troubling: their network of Soviet agents began disappearing at an alarming rate. These weren’t low-level informants—these were key sources in the Soviet bloc who had been carefully recruited and trusted. The agency knew something was terribly wrong.

     Enter Sandy Grimes and her team, the unsung heroes of this story. Grimes was a veteran CIA officer who had worked alongside Ames for years. She, along with Jeanne Vertefeuille, Paul Redmond, and a small team of investigators, was tasked with finding the mole. The toughest part? They knew this traitor wasn’t some shadowy figure lurking in the background. He was one of their own—someone they’d known for years, someone they’d passed in the hallways of CIA headquarters, and someone they might have even called a friend.

     The investigation wasn’t easy. The CIA had to be methodical. They couldn’t afford to point fingers without concrete proof—especially when it came to accusing a senior officer like Ames. The team pored over financial records, scrutinized his calendar, and connected the dots between Ames' unexplained wealth and the disappearing agents.

     Grimes and Vertefeuille, who would later co-author Circle of Treason about their experience, worked tirelessly alongside their team. They knew the stakes couldn’t have been higher. Each piece of evidence had to be meticulously analyzed because the lives of American assets hung in the balance.

     Ames, ever the intellectual, thought he was smarter than everyone around him. He even gave Grimes a lecture once on how to catch a mole, completely unaware that she was closing in on him. It was as if his arrogance knew no bounds—he had been so confident that he would never be caught.

     But Grimes and her team were relentless. They kept him under surveillance, careful not to tip him off. “It was part of Sandy’s job not to spook him,” one CIA officer later remarked. And she was masterful at it.

     The end came on a cold February morning in 1994. Ames was on his way to an urgent meeting at CIA headquarters when the FBI swooped in and arrested him. He didn’t resist. He had known for a long time that this day might come. With his capture, one of the most damaging chapters in CIA history was finally closed.

     Today, Ames is serving a life sentence, but the shadow of his betrayal lingers. The agents who were exposed and executed because of him will never be forgotten, and the damage he caused will always serve as a grim reminder of the dangers posed by moles within intelligence agencies. Sandy Grimes put it best when she said, “These brave men knew when they agreed to work for the United States government they were putting their lives in our hands, and we failed them.”

     In the end, Ames’s betrayal wasn’t about ideology or a twisted sense of loyalty—it was simply about greed. He sold out his country, and in doing so, cost countless lives. The work that Grimes, Vertefeuille, and their team did to uncover this traitor reminds us that in the world of intelligence, the fight to protect our nation’s secrets never ends. Every so often, there’s someone who turns on the country they swore to protect. But thanks to people like Sandy Grimes, justice eventually finds them. 

Robert Morton is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and the author of the "Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster" spy thriller series. Check out his latest spy thriller, Misson of Vengeance.