Aldrich Ames

Aldrich Ames
Ames' mug shot, taken on the day of his arrest
Born	Aldrich Hazen Ames (1941-05-26) May 26, 1941 (age 75) River Falls, Wisconsin, U.S.
Occupation	former CIA operative and analyst, KGB agent
Criminal charge	18 U.S.C. § 794(c) (Espionage Act)
Criminal penalty	Life imprisonment (without parole)
Criminal status	Incarcerated
Spouse(s)	Nancy Segebarth (div.) Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy
Parent(s)	Carleton Cecil Ames Rachel Aldrich Ames

Aldrich Hazen Ames (born May 26, 1941) is a former American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative and analyst turned KGB mole, who was convicted of espionage in 1994. He is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole in the high-security Allenwood U.S. Penitentiary. Ames was formerly a 31-year CIA counterintelligence operative and analyst who committed espionage against the United States by spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. At the time of his arrest, Ames had compromised more CIA "assets" than any other mole in history until Robert Hanssen's arrest seven years later. As far as is currently known, Ames compromised the second-most number of assets, behind only Hanssen.

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. Aldrich was the eldest of three children and the only son. In 1952, his father began working for the CIA's Directorate of Operations in Virginia, and in 1953 was posted to Southeast Asia for three years, accompanied by his family. Carleton received a "particularly negative performance appraisal" in part because of a serious drinking problem and spent the remainder of his career at CIA headquarters.

Ames attended high school at McLean High School in McLean, Virginia. Beginning in 1957, following his sophomore year, Ames worked for the CIA for three summers as a low-ranking (GS-3) records analyst, marking classified documents for filing. In 1959, Ames entered the University of Chicago planning to study foreign cultures and history, but his "long-time passion" for drama resulted in failing grades, and he did not finish his sophomore year. Ames worked at the CIA during the summer of 1960 as a laborer/painter. He then became an assistant technical director at a Chicago theater until February 1962. Returning to the Washington area, Ames took full-time employment at the CIA doing the same sort of clerical jobs he had performed in high school.