On a hot August afternoon in 1985, Aldrich Hazen Ames exchanged vows with Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy in a charming little church nestled by a hill in Arlington, Virginia. It was the bridegroom's second marriage, the bride's first. The small knot of family members and friends, sweltering in the humid, 87 degreesF air, might have expected to be rewarded with a meal for their attendance. But after the ceremony, guests were offered only wine. Ames explained that he couldn't afford a fancy reception because the cost of his previous marriage's breakup had cleaned him out. Guests had no reason to doubt him. His divorce from Nancy, a fellow Central Intelligence Agency employee, had become final only 12 days earlier in New York City. In preceding months, Ames had complained bitterly to colleagues at the CIA that the long, messy divorce had gutted his modest civil service paycheck, leaving him "poor."
But Ames' finances had taken a sharp turn for the better in a way that he could not admit to his colleagues at the CIA. Actually, he and Rosario had enough money to spring for champagne, canapes and caviar. Three months before, on May 18, Rosario had made a $9,000 cash deposit in her checking account at the Dominion Bank of Virginia. Before their wedding day, that nest egg would grow to $38,100 as Rosario made another deposit and Ames made five deposits to his own checking account at the same bank. The money had come from Moscow.
On that sticky day in August 1985, Ames had a lot on his mind. Only 10 days earlier, Vitali Yurchenko, a senior Soviet intelligence official, had defected -- or pretended to defect -- to the U.S. Ames had been assigned to meet Yurchenko's plane at Andrews Air Force Base, but after a night of drinking, he'd overslept his alarm and he arrived a few minutes late. Now, after that inauspicious start, Ames was involved in debriefing Yurchenko every day on KGB operations against Western countries, including penetration of U.S. agencies. Ames was also preparing for a transfer from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to Rome and was trying to master Italian.
At the same time, Ames may have been concerned that his marriage was frowned upon by his CIA superiors. The couple first met in 1982 while holding down posts in Mexico City, he as a CIA case officer, she as a cultural attache at the Colombian embassy. The next year, he put her on the CIA payroll as an informant. By the time they left Mexico later that year, Rosario was his girlfriend. CIA case officers are not supposed to have affairs with their agents or marry foreign nationals. Somehow Ames got away with doing both.