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Ames returned to the CIA's Langley headquarters in 1972, where he reportedly spent the next five years brushing up his analytic skills. The year Jimmy Carter was elected President, Ames moved north to New York City, where he did what most CIA spycatchers do when they're posted to Manhattan: he hunted potential "human assets" at the United Nations. If Ames hadn't come to the KGB's attention in Ankara, he certainly did while in Manhattan. During that four-year tour, Ames and his wife lived in a 31-story building on the East Side, a five-minute walk from the U.N.
When Ames was posted to Mexico City in 1981, Nancy did not follow. As in Ankara and New York, Ames was assigned to the CIA's Soviet/East Europe (S.E.) division to hunt potential agents. At that time, with President Reagan soon to embark on a crusade against the "Evil Empire," the fever for recruiting Soviet spies was rising. In the fall of 1980 the FBI and CIA had launched Operation Courtship in the hope of penetrating the big KGB station in Washington. While Ames was in Mexico dining and cultivating KGB officers, the FBI netted two important Washington-based KGB spies: Lieut. Colonel Valeri Martynov, a scientific specialist who masqueraded as an embassy cultural- affairs officer; and Major Sergei Motorin, a political-affairs specialist. Their secret would not be safe.
It remains a mystery whether Ames, despite a frantic effort to cultivate one particular KGB officer, recruited any Soviets during this period in Mexico -- or allowed himself to be seduced by the other side. But he did make one contact that would change his life: Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, a cultural attache at the Colombian embassy. "She was efficient and stood out because of her intelligence," says Noemi Sanin, Colombia's Foreign Minister. "We are investigating her activities now, but initially they seem all normal." According to the affidavit released last week by U.S. prosecutors, the CIA began to court her in June 1982. Ten months later, she went on the CIA payroll.
Rosario is a member of a prominent Colombian family. Her father was a respected Senator, and she was a respected figure in her own right. After obtaining a master's degree in ancient Greek, she taught Greek, literary theory and contemporary culture at the University of the Andes from 1976 to 1982. Students remember her as a brilliant scholar and a dedicated teacher. - During those years, Rosario hobnobbed with some of the region's greatest writers, among them Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Gretel Wernher, dean of the social-sciences department, characterizes Rosario's student years as "disciplined and responsible." Those qualities would be essential to helping Rosario and Ames hide their espionage activities in the years to come -- especially since Ames, by one colleague's account, "wasn't a man who paid a lot of attention to detail."
It is unknown what drew the bookwormish Rosario and the unintellectual Ames together. The larger question is who turned whose patriotic loyalties. Was Rosario the original turncoat, playing along with Ames in order to recruit him for her Moscow handlers? Or was Ames a double agent by then, persuading Rosario to spy first on Colombia for the U.S., then on the U.S. for the Soviet Union? Two FBI officials involved in the case insist that Ames was turned first and that Rosario went along, subsequently displaying aggressive greed.