Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 23, 1994                   TAG: 9402230157
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

CIA AGENT, WIFE ARRESTED

Aldrich Hazen Ames, 52, who once ran a section of the CIA's Soviet counterintelligence operation, and his wife, Maria, 41, are accused of taking more than $1.5 million over the past nine years to feed classified information to Soviet and Russian agents and disclose the identities of U.S. intelligence sources abroad.

An affidavit prepared by the FBI accuses the couple of receiving payments up to Jan. 21.

The case has erupted at a critical moment in U.S.-Russian relations, with the nations working to solve the crisis in Bosnia and Russia's economic problems.

President Clinton said Tuesday, "We will be immediately lodging a protest to the Russian government."

He would not comment on damage to security or relations with Russia, but White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers said, "We are having very serious, very forthright discussions with the Russians both in Washington and in Moscow about this incident."

A spokesman at the Russian Embassy would say only that he had "no information. This came out of the blue."

Security analysts are particularly interested in the period from 1983 to 1985, when Ames was chief of a Soviet counterintelligence unit within the CIA and U.S. agents were being uncovered with regularity.

"Beginning in 1983 and lasting for two or three years, the Soviets rolled up just about every active U.S. agent inside the Soviet Union," CIA historian Thomas Powers wrote in 1990.

At the time, it was thought that those agents, including Soviet Lt. Gen. Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, who was executed for leaking information, had been compromised by a CIA defector, Edward Lee Howard.

Now Aldrich Ames, whose "top secret" clearance put him in a perfect position to report on U.S. agents and espionage operations inside the Soviet Union, joins Howard on the list of suspects, suggested Ron Kessler, author of "Inside the CIA."

Kessler said he understood that Ames finally was uncovered by a KGB double agent who identified him and other Soviet agents in the United States.

Ames was only a mid-level figure - comparable to a lieutenant colonel in the military, CIA Director James Woolsey said Tuesday - but he wasn't low-profile.

Though Ames earned $70,000 a year, he and his wife owned a $40,000 Jaguar; put $50,000 a year on credit cards; had a farm in Colombia, where Maria Ames was born; and paid $540,000 in cash for their house in Arlington, Va.

They were picked up and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage after a two-year investigation by FBI and CIA agents who bugged, tailed and wiretapped the couple, searched home computer files, scoured their bank records and reportedly listened as the two argued about whether a suitcase was a good way to carry a lot of cash.