Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 27, 1994 TAG: 9402270103
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
But the Class of '59 never dreamed that Ricky Ames someday might make his own deal with the devil, becoming what investigators now describe as one of the most ruthless double-agents in U.S. intelligence history.
Perhaps just as fascinating as the secrets Aldrich Hazen Ames purportedly revealed, though, are the ones he kept.
And what emerges from the faded memories of old friends and acquaintances, and from the stark print of the 39-page criminal complaint against him, provides little more than a grainy snapshot.
There is little to suggest what allegedly motivated 52-year-old Rick Ames, beyond the $1.5 million the FBI maintains he collected since 1985 from the former KGB.
The government's thick affidavit depicts a cunning spy who would travel to South America to collect wads of misbegotten cash but wasn't willing to leave a signal for his handlers at a Washington mailbox because, as he explained to his wife in a taped conversation, "it's raining like crazy out there."
Snippets of exchanges between husband and wife - both now in jail and charged with espionage, allegations they have denied through lawyers - suggest an almost homey relationship amid cloak-and-dagger capers. "Well, honey, I hope you didn't screw up," Rosario Ames chided her husband after he admitted his reluctance to go out in the rain.
High school classmates were so impressed by Rick Ames' cleverness that they voted him "wittiest" during senior year. The black-and-white photo illustrating this award shows Ricky Ames hamming it up, hand clutching his belly and face scrunched up in a huge guffaw.
The criminal complaint against Ames and his wife notes that a Northwest Washington mailbox he allegedly marked with chalk as a signal to KGB handlers was code-named "S.S. Smile."
"He traveled with this set that was a combination of artsy-crafty and intellectual," recalled Michael Horwatt, a Vienna attorney who was a high school chum. "They liked the game of cleverness. They had a touch of smugness about them."
Kathryn Hartzler was part of that clique too and, like Ricky Ames, was involved in music, debate and drama.
"I can't tell you a lot of details," she said Saturday. "It's not as if he was skulking around putting chalk marks on lockers."
Herb Erb was stunned to learn that the Aldrich Ames making headlines was the Ricky Ames he used to pal around with. "I mean, he never struck me as the wily kind," he said. "I thought he was going to be a thespian. . . . He had more of an artistic bent than a bureaucratic bent. I wouldn't have pictured him working in an organization as highly structured as the CIA."
Of more than a dozen former classmates, friends and distant relatives contacted by the Post, most had vivid memories not of Rick Ames, but of his mother, Rachel.
Rachel Ames was described as a woman of extraordinary integrity, a doting mother and a beloved teacher at McLean High.
"He was the apple of her eye, really," recalled family friend Jane Wilhelm. "I think it might kill her to know this if she were still alive."
Rick Ames was a second-generation spy for the CIA, the only son of a history professor recruited by the agency in the 1950s. Carleton Ames soon traded his ivory-tower life in Wisconsin for a dangerous and exotic posting in newly independent Burma.
Ricky moved with his parents and his two younger sisters to Rangoon when he was 10 years old.
Wilhelm, now 80, can still see him all spiffed up for his first day of school at the new British academy there. Wilhelm was enrolling her own three children that day. She and Rachel Ames became lifelong friends until Ames, by then a widow, died of a heart attack in 1986.
"Carleton was a very handsome man, tall, with a beautiful mane of gray hair," recalled Wilhelm, who later became the assistant principal at McLean High and got Ames her teaching job there when the family relocated to Washington.
The Ameses moved into a modest brick Cape Cod across the street from the school.
Others also remembered Carleton Ames as an imposing, somewhat dashing figure. It was an open secret that he was a CIA agent.
There was something else Carleton Ames couldn't hide very well either: his alcoholism.
Wilhelm and several other longtime family friends acknowledged this. Carleton Ames was known to sometimes go on binges and vanish. It was not something the glib Ricky Ames was given to talking about.
"His mother was generally viewed as a saint," said one former friend who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Still, Carleton Ames evidently provided something of a role model for Rick, who like his father, earned a college degree in history, and, like his father, joined the CIA.
"Ricky never had any job except the CIA his whole life," Wilhelm said.
Michael Horwatt keeps coming back to a "certain vulnerable and inscrutable part" of Rick Ames, and the impression that "somehow he was so alone."
"There are certain people you know what's going on inside them," Horwatt said, "and others you don't."
"I never was quite sure what was in there."
by CNB