Not my words. 

 

One of the women responsible for catching Aldrich (Rick) Ames said he never respected the women who worked with him in the CIA. He thought they were "dumb broads."

 

 

And maybe they never would have, except for Jeanne Vertefeuille (pronounced VER-teh-fay), who refused to retire until the traitor was caught.

 

 

Jeanne worked as Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Gabon in 1986, when

she got an urgent a cable headquarters in Langley, Va.

 

 

Soviets passing information to the CIA. ("assets" in spy language) had vanished. Communication from an alarming number of assets had ceased in the last half of 1985. During the Cold War, disappearing agents meant dead agents.

 

 

 

Sandy and Jeanne compiled a list of anyone and everyone in the CIA who had had access to the names of the agents who disappeared. They quickly eliminated many of the 198 people, finally narrowing it to three. Ames was one of the three.

 

We asked everyone the same questions, no deviation," said Sandy. "Jeanne was a genius, she was the one who devised the [last] question. It was a marvelous question. 'If you were going to volunteer to the soviet government, how would you go about it?'"
 

Others answered the question by theorizing myriad possibilities of how they might connect with the Soviets and become double agents. Sandy and Jeanne figured Rick Ames would appreciate the intellectual challenge this question presented.

 

"He loved the what if questions his whole career, but he was so taken aback.
His reaction was so opposite of what we would have expected of Rick. [He]
could not conceive of Jeanne or I finding a KGB penetration of the CIA, We were both females. He seriously consider us to be dumb broads. He didn’t think we would ever, ever pinpoint him."

 

But Ames gave himself away in that interview and soon they discovered that large cash deposits to his bank account correlated with meetings he had with Soviet official back in 1985. The meetings had not appeared suspicious at the time because they had been within the scope of his agency work.

 

Now the FBI joined the investigation and discovered incriminating evidence in Ames' garbage and on his computer.

 

In 1993, the FBI found this note by Aldrich Ames concerning a meeting with his KGB contact in Bogota, Columbia, in the trash. FBI / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images

 

Ames was arrested on February 21, 1994, and pleaded guilty, admitting that on June 13, 1985, he turned over the identities of “virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me.”

 

At the time, Ames was chief of the CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence branch. He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. In total, he betrayed at least 30 agents, eleven of whom were executed. The KGB stated Ames was paid $4.6 million dollars for CIA secrets. He's serving a life sentence in federal prison.

 

Jeanne continued to consult with the CIA after her retirement, serving the intelligence agency 58 years, working until just prior to her death in 2012. According to the CIA, she is remember as a driven, focused officer who demanded excellence and was always devoted to the mission.

 

Jeanne Vertefeuille started her career when nearly all spies were men, paving the way for women in the CIA.

 

 

 

 

If you're holiday shopping early, here are some great books for kids about women spies and code breakers. 

 

Mary Bowser and the Civil War Spy Ring: A Spy on History Book, Written by Enigma Alberti and illustrated by Tony Cliff

 

 

Code Breaker, Spy Hunter: How Elizebeth Friedman Changed the Course of Two World Wars  Written by Laurie Wallmark and illustrated by Brooke Smart