Remembering Sandra Grimes, mole hunter : NPR
Sandra “Sandy” Grimes, who worked at the CIA in the late 1960s, at home in Great Falls, Virginia. As a researcher of Operation Playactor, Grimes created a chronology that helped identify Ames as a spy.
Nikki Kahn / The Washington Post via Getty Images
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Nikki Kahn / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Sandra “Sandy” Grimes, who worked at the CIA in the late 1960s, at home in Great Falls, Virginia. As a researcher of Operation Playactor, Grimes created a chronology that helped identify Ames as a spy.
Nikki Kahn / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Before Sandra Grimes became a taupe hunter, she was ready to go back. “I was not old enough at the time to retire,” said Grimes in an interview for the National Security Archives at George Washington University, “but I was satisfied professionally. I had a family with which I wanted to spend more time.”
It was in 1991. Sandra Grimes had spent more than two decades with the CIA. But she agreed to stay help to help a colleague to investigate why agency informants in the Soviet Union had “become dark”, as they are said in Spycrat species in 1985 and 1986. They learned that they had been identified, interviewed and often executed.
“It was a terrible and terrible reminder of the gravity of what we have done in life,” said Sandra Grimes in this interview with national security archives. “We owe all those people who had made the sacrifice.”
Their investigation led them to examine Aldrich Ames closely, which they knew under the name of “Rick”. He was the head of the CIA countelertness for Soviet operations and knew all the informants of the USSR agency.
Rick Ames had episodes of public intoxication, continued business, which sparked an expensive divorce and married one of his former informants. He started wearing tailor -made costumes, got his teeth stuck, then paid for cash for a new house and bought a Jaguar. All about the salary of an official.
Sandra Grimes examined the business newspapers and the financial statements and noticed that three times after I have had lunch with an official of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, he deposited thousands of people on his bank account.
“Well, three games are not convinced, but in my mind, Rick was the spy,” recalls Sandra Grimes. “It didn’t take any rocket to add a plus one more.”
Aldrich Ames was arrested in 1994 and pleaded guilty of spying, after taking millions of dollars for his spy work for the Soviet Union. He always purges a perpetuity sentence.
Sandra Grimes died on July 25 at the age of 79. His work was crucial to catching and arresting a Soviet agent who, the Senate intelligence committee, said more damage to the United States national security than any spy in CIA history. “”
