Ames: Secrets Did Not Harm Security

WASHINGTON -- Confessed spy Aldrich Ames says he has "a lot of respect ... and gratitude" for his Russian handlers, and does not believe the secrets he sold them "damaged our national security in any significant way."


Ames, in his first television interview, said he has avoided despair and still hopes to go free someday, despite his sentence to life imprisonment without parole.


"I don't think you can live otherwise," Ames told the Cable News Network in an interview at the federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania.


Asked if he believed there were other moles still inside the CIA, Ames said, "Probably."


The ex-Central Intelligence Agency official sold secrets to Moscow for more than eight years, until his arrest last February. His wife, Rosario, is serving a five-year prison term.


CNN will air the interview Tuesday night in an hour-long show.


CIA Director James Woolsey has called Ames a "warped, murdering traitor." Several of the Soviet and East European double agents he unmasked were executed.


But Ames sought to play down the damage he inflicted.


"While I betrayed my public trust, I don't believe that that betrayal damaged our national security in any significant way," Ames said.


He said the United States "historically had hardly any agents who ever reported any valuable or significant political information on what was happening in the Soviet Union."


While some of the double agents were executed, Ames said, others "have been released from jail, or finished their jail terms and are out."


And these double agents "identified a lot of American or British agents of the KGB who are now doing jail time in Britain and this country and elsewhere," he said.


Ames said he passed CIA lie detector tests by staying calm and following the Soviets' advice to develop "a good rapport" with the person administering the polygraph.


Asked if he had anything to say to his Russian handlers, Ames said, "I have a lot of respect for them, and gratitude."


"They worked real hard and they did everything they could ... from their point of view to take good care of me," he said.


His motivation for walking into the Soviet Embassy in Washington in April 1985 was "greed, weakness (and) fear," Ames said.


He got $50,000 for giving the Soviets what he considered "fake information" -- a list of Soviets who had volunteered to help the CIA but who were actually working for the KGB. He said he fully intended to stop after pulling that "scam."


"It was after that, in a much less conscious sort of process, that I took the deeper plunge and gave real agents up," said Ames, who bought a Jaguar automobile and fancy home with the $2 million the Soviets later paid him. "I should have been much more careful," said Ames.


The Russians "credited me with a great deal more care, awareness, sensitivity than I showed. But you do have to remember that a $500,000 house in the Washington suburbs is not unusual for civil servants. Buying it for cash is."


Ames cried when asked about his six-year-old son, Paul, now living with his wife's parents in her native Colombia.


"There's a tremendous amount of grief and remorse that I have to deal with," he said. "There's a sense in which I have perhaps died for him."


He said he would describe himself to his son as "someone who ... was weak and afraid and allowed himself to betray a number of different sorts of trusts."


Ames said he feels like "I've been sent to live in another country, a very foreign, distinct country, and I have to learn to live in this country. You can cope."