Aldrich Ames was done selling secrets, but the unravelling of his treachery had just begun.
On Feb. 21, 1994, the bespectacled, Jaguar-driving, Central Intelligence Agency lifer, with a cash-purchased home in a Washington suburb, was arrested and charged with espionage.
By that point, the CIA knew it’d been a mistake to have had Ames running the Soviet branch of its counter-intelligence division in the mid-1980s — as Moscow had since paid him more than $2 million US to pass on sensitive information, including the names of people secretly working for U.S. intelligence behind the Iron Curtain.
Two months later, Ames would plead guilty to espionage charges and receive a life sentence for what
