(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for records about the investigation of Aldrich Ames, the former CIA officer who spied for the Soviet Union and Russia for nearly nine years, compromising U.S. intelligence operations and exposing American intelligence sources (Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice (Case 1:26-cv-03818)).
The lawsuit was filed after the FBI failed to respond to Judicial Watch’s January 2026 FOIA request for all records concerning any FBI investigation of Ames.
In April 1997, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) produced a report titled “A Review of the FBI’s Performance in Uncovering the Espionage Activities of Aldrich Hazen Ames,” which is summarized here. The summary details failures by the FBI and CIA to investigate the loss of American intelligence sources, which allowed Ames’ espionage to go undetected for years:
The story of the Ames case begins with a catastrophic and unprecedented loss of Soviet intelligence sources suffered by the CIA and the FBI in 1985 and 1986. Both agencies initially mounted efforts aimed at determining the cause of these losses (which stemmed from Ames’ collaboration with the KGB) but as time passed, the level of attention devoted to this issue by the FBI and the CIA sharply declined.
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The failure of the CIA and the FBI to pursue a joint investigation of the lost assets issue prior to 1991 significantly delayed the detection of Ames’ espionage. Neither internal CIA and FBI records concerning Ames’ 1985-86 unreported meetings with a Soviet diplomat, nor bank records showing Ames’ subsequent large cash deposits, were examined. Moreover, potentially incriminating information concerning Ames that became available at the CIA at this time was not properly referred to the FBI for investigation.
By late 1989, CIA personnel began to receive highly disturbing information concerning Ames’ finances. A CIA colleague of Ames reported to CIA counterintelligence personnel that Ames, who had been experiencing financial difficulties prior to 1986, experienced a sudden, unexplained improvement in his finances. This CIA employee reported that Ames had purchased a $540,000 house in 1989 and engaged in lavish spending, all on a Government salary of $40,000 to $50,000 a year. The CIA employee’s tip also specifically linked Ames’ sudden wealth to his knowledge of the cases compromised in 1985 and 1986.
The CIA’s investigation of this lead regarding Ames quickly revealed more disturbing information, including the fact that Ames had purchased his $540,000 home in 1989 for cash, i.e., with no mortgage, and that he had engaged in three substantial cash transactions, totaling more than $50,000, between 1985 and 1989. Despite these facts and the existence of a 1988 FBI/CIA Memorandum of Understanding stating that the CIA would provide timely notice to the FBI of any conduct by CIA officers that raised counterintelligence concerns, no information concerning Ames was provided to the FBI prior to mid-1991.
The FBI opened its investigation in May 1993. Ames and his wife both pled guilty to federal charges related to espionage and tax evasion in 1994.
Ames died in January 2026 at age 84 while serving a life sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland.
“The Aldrich Ames espionage case exposed serious failures in our intelligence and law enforcement agencies,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The American people deserve to know the facts about this disturbing chapter in our nation’s intelligence history.”
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