Unmasking the deadliest traitor in Central Intelligence Agency history was not a matter of decrypting codes, staking out dead drop sites or any other piece of spy craft out of a John le Carré novel.
Aldrich H. Ames, the C.I.A. mole whose betrayal led to the execution of at least eight Russian double agents who spied for the U.S., a devastating setback for American intelligence, was discovered from bookkeeping entries.
He was identified by a counterintelligence analyst, Sandra Grimes, who was once in charge of C.I.A. secretaries and clerks. In 1992, merging data from two spreadsheets, Ms. Grimes noticed that Mr. Ames made bank deposits of up to $9,000 on three occasions just after lunches with a Soviet Embassy official in Washington.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell what is going on here,” she exclaimed to her colleagues. “Rick is a goddamn Russian spy.”
Mr. Ames was arrested in 1994, pleaded guilty to selling the C.I.A.’s family jewels for millions of dollars from Moscow and is serving a life term in prison.
Ms. Grimes, who had been planning to retire in 1991 when she was asked to stay for one more assignment — helping to solve the nearly forgotten puzzle of why the agency’s Soviet informants suddenly went silent six years earlier — died at her home in Great Falls, Va. on July 25, at 79.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter Tracy Hobiena said.
Ms. Grimes was part of a small team that the C.I.A. created to investigate the disappearance of its Soviet bloc “assets,” who, beginning in 1985, were arrested, interrogated and executed for treason. Their loss wiped out a network of informants that the agency had long cultivated, and, during fraught years of the Cold War, dimmed American policymakers’ insights into Moscow’s thinking.
Long before the C.I.A. accepted that it had an internal leaker, Ms. Grimes, who had once car-pooled with Mr. Ames, was convinced that he was the mole.
For her, the hunt was personal. She had spent her early years at the agency transcribing onto index cards the reports of a Russian military intelligence officer, Dmitri Polyakov, one of the sources betrayed by Mr. Ames.
She dedicated “Circle of Treason,” her 2012 account of the Ames case written with a fellow mole hunter, Jeanne Vertefeuille, to General Polyakov, who was executed in 1988.
Mr. Ames became the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence chief for Soviet operations in 1983, with knowledge of every Soviet double agent worldwide. Newly married and under financial strain, he sold them all out for at least $2.7 million.
The internal investigation of the devastating losses, begun in late 1986 by a four-person task force (though not yet including Ms. Grimes), was soon mired in bureaucracy and dragged on for years.
The agency was unsure if it was looking for a mole or if the Soviets had planted a bug or hacked its communications network. The K.G.B. used disinformation to throw the C.I.A. off Mr. Ames’s trail.
The Senate Intelligence Committee in a 1994 report found that C.I.A. leaders were “unwilling and unable — particularly in the early years of Ames’s betrayal — to face, assess and investigate the catastrophic blow Ames had dealt to the core of its operations.”
The committee singled out “the work of a small group” of analysts who pursued “a long and arduous inquiry” that ultimately exposed Mr. Ames.
In 1989, one of the investigators, Diana Worthen, who had known Mr. Ames when both were stationed in Mexico City, pointed out that he was suddenly wealthy. He paid $540,000 in cash that year for a house in Northern Virginia and drove a new Jaguar on a salary of around $70,000 a year.
But Ms. Worthen’s tip was largely ignored. Only after Ms. Grimes in 1992 correlated Mr. Ames’s large bank deposits to his boozy lunch meetings with a Russian official did the F.B.I. take over the case in 1993. Its investigation included sifting through Mr. Ames’s trash and tracking his car. He was arrested in February 1994.
The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Mr. Ames “caused more damage to the national security of the United States than any spy in the history of the C.I.A.”
Sandra Joyce Venable, who called herself “a certified product of the Cold War,” was born on Aug. 10, 1945, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to parents who met in Oak Ridge, Tenn., while working on the Manhattan Project.
Her father, Isaac Venable, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her mother, Mary (Twitty) Venable, who had joined the Women’s Army Corps during World War II, moved the family to Los Alamos, N.M., the birthplace of the atom bomb. Sandy, as she was known, began elementary school there. After another family move, she attended high school in a Denver suburb, where, to avoid a dreaded physics course, she took Russian language. The decision set her life’s direction.
She went on to major in Russian at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1966, a C.I.A. recruiter visiting the campus was protested by students, but Ms. Grimes crossed the picket line for an interview after a former boyfriend told her, “You would make a perfect spy.”
She was hired by the C.I.A. soon after graduation and joined the Soviet bloc division within the directorate of operations. To her chagrin, she was assigned secretarial duties.
In 1970, she was upgraded to professional status, and for more than a decade she worked in a group managing Soviet counterintelligence.
“One by one I was brought into the cases of many Soviet assets,” she wrote in “Circle of Treason.” By processing and analyzing the “work product” of the double agents she acquired knowledge of the Soviet intelligence hierarchy. In 1981, she was transferred to oversee clerical and secretarial staff at the agency for two years.
When she sought a move to the division overseeing field operations in the Soviet bloc, her bosses at first resisted — she was an analyst, not a case officer with experience abroad — but, in a compromise, she was made deputy chief of field operations for Africa, based at C.I.A. headquarters. She became chief in 1984.
In 1989, Ms. Grimes scaled back to part-time work to spend time with her family. Two years later, she put aside plans to retire to join the mole hunt team.
Besides Ms. Hobiena, Ms. Grimes is survived by another daughter, Kelly Cooper; her husband of 56 years, Gary Grimes; four grandchildren; and two sisters, Mary Venable and Patsy Schierlmann.
As she raised her family, Ms. Grimes never spoke at home of her work or shared details of the brutal fate of Russian agents whose reports she had analyzed for years, Ms. Hobiena said.
“She had assets that were being murdered, people she was responsible for keeping safe, and she couldn’t come home and talk about that,” Ms. Hobiena said. “For her to be a professional and be a mother and wife through all those years, it’s a pretty exceptional story and tells you a lot about who she was.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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