Born: May 26, 1941

During his thirty-two year career at the CIA, Aldrich Hazen Ames was known as a mediocre agent who tended to drink too much. What Ames’s superiors did not know was worse than that: he was, from 1985 to 1994, a mole (spy) who passed top-level national secrets to the Soviet Union.

First contact

Ames’s role as a Soviet mole began in April 1985. In order to create a legitimate reason to visit the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., he arranged to meet with Sergei Chuvakin, an embassy diplomat who was an expert on nuclear weapons. Ames told the Soviet diplomat that he wanted to meet in order to discuss foreign policy issues. He told his superiors at the CIA that he had arranged the meeting in order to attempt to recruit Chuvakin (to spy for the U.S.). But in truth, he...