Sandra Grimes | |
|---|---|
 Sandra Grimes at the International Spy Museum, on July 22, 2016 | |
| Born | August 1945 (age 79) |
| Occupation | Former CIA operative (1966–1993) |
Sandra Grimes is a former CIA officer who participated in a small team that investigated and uncovered the actions of Aldrich Ames, [1] a United States counterintelligence officer who was subsequently convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.
Grimes was born in August 1945 to a couple who met in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and worked together on the Manhattan Project. [2] She went to school in Los Alamos, then left and did the rest of her schooling in Denver, Colorado. [2] While in high school she enrolled in a course in Russian, in which she excelled and gave her the encouragement to later major in Russian language at the University of Washington in Seattle. [2]
In October 1966, a friend informed Grimes that a CIA recruiter was on campus, [2] and told her she "would make a perfect spy." [3] She subsequently interviewed with the CIA, and was hired as a GS-06 Intelligence Assistant, a job classification which required that she obtain security and medical clearances before being granted unrestricted access to the potentially sensitive documentation she would be seeing. [3] When she reported for duty at the Ames building in Rosslyn, Virginia, she and her fellow co-workers became clerical employees. [3]
Grimes' first job was working in the Soviet Bloc Division of the Directorate of Operations, [4] which included the intelligence from then Colonel Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov. She trained herself to become familiar with Soviet intelligence services, during which she used index cards to track counterintelligence and positive intelligence. [4]
In Fall 1968, Grimes attended operations training and met SE Division expert Dick Kovich. [5] In 1970, she eventually was granted an interview for conversion to professional status [5] and afterward worked her way up and was given the duty of replacing a senior intelligence analyst in the Branch. [6] She later became a Soviet and Eastern European Division officer and remained with their counterintelligence group for eleven years, holding various titles and positions. [7] It was through this experience that she gained knowledge of the KGB and the GRU. [7] [8] During this time. Grimes worked or assisted in cases which included Aleksey Isidorovich Kulak and Leonid Georgiyevich Poleshchuk. [7]
In the late 1970s, through an organizational change in the CI group, she met Jeanne Vertefeuille. [9] Grimes and McCoy made a proposal to create two branches in the CI group, both of which to handle CI dissemination and production in a specific geographical region. [10] One would deal with the Soviet bloc and the other the Eastern European bloc. Eventually, the two branches merged, where Vertefeuille was the chief and Grimes became the Soviet section chief. [10]
In 1981, after 14 years in CI, Grimes moved to the Career Management Staff after a change in feelings. [11]
In early 1983, she eventually moved on to becoming deputy chief of external operations in Africa and two weeks later became acting chief. [12] In early 1984, Grimes was appointed permanent Chief of SE External Operations for Africa. [12]
After the arrest of then General Poleshchuk on October 2, 1985, in January 1986, Grimes was part of the attempt to stop CIA assets from being exposed, which was an extraordinary "back room" security procedure. [11] This role was in addition to Grimes' role of Chief of SE External Operations for Africa. [11]
She was eventually brought into a CIA operation in Bonn. An anonymous write-in, involving a person named Mister. X, mentioned that the Soviet sources of the CIA were compromised due to a penetration of the CIA communications. [13] The author demanded $50,000 in a cache or dead drop in East Berlin. In March 1987, Grimes was transferred from her position in Africa and was assigned to the Moscow Task Force. [13] Moscow Embassy Marine Guard Arnold Bracy and Clayton Lonetree allowed the KGB entry to the secure areas within the U.S. Embassy. [14]
In 1989, Grimes moved from being Chief of the Production Branch to a part-time position in the Special Projects Section. [15] In early 1991, she was working on GTPROLOGUE when she was offered the assignment to investigate the 1985 loss of Polyakov and others. [15]
During a joint mole-hunt, Grimes was a member of the team who made the first breakthrough in 1992. [16] She correlated times that Ames met with Sergey Dmitriyevich Chuvakhin, his KGB contact, with times that he made large bank deposits in 1985 and 1986. [8]
In early 1993, Grimes resigned from the CIA. [17]
In 2012, Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed, a book co-authored by Grimes and Vertefeuille, was published by the Naval Institute Press. [18] Vertefeuille subsequently died from brain cancer at the age of 80 on 29 December of that same year. [19] According to Peter Earnest, executive director (emeritus) of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, Vertefeuille's "friend, in her final days, was, of course, Sandy Grimes. They had been friends for years, very close friends, and very close teammates." [20]
In 2014, ABC aired The Assets , an eight-part American drama television miniseries based on Circle of Treason. [21]
Aldrich Hazen Ames is an American former CIA counterintelligence officer who was convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union and Russia in 1994. He is serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, in the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana. Ames was known to have compromised more highly classified CIA assets than any other officer until Robert Hanssen, who was arrested seven years later in 2001.
Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG is a former colonel of the KGB who became KGB resident-designate (rezident) and bureau chief in London.
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Victor Ivanovich Cherkashin is a former Soviet foreign counter-intelligence officer of the PGU KGB SSSR. He was the case officer for both Aldrich Ames, a CIA counter-intelligence officer, and Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent.
Samuel Loring Morison was a former American intelligence professional who was convicted of espionage and theft of government property in 1985 and pardoned in 2001. He was "the only [American] government official ever convicted for giving classified information to the press."
Clayton J. Lonetree is a former U.S. Marine who was court-martialed and convicted of espionage for the Soviet KGB; he served nine years in prison for espionage. During the early 1980s, Lonetree was a Marine Corps Security Guard stationed at the Embassy of the United States in Moscow.
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Dmitri Fyodorovich Polyakov was a Major General in the Soviet GRU during the Cold War. According to former high-level KGB officer Sergey Kondrashev, Polyakov acted as a KGB disinformation agent at the FBI's New York City field office when he was posted at United Nations headquarters in 1962. Kondrashev's post-Cold War friend, former high-level CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley, says Polyakov "flipped" and started spying for the CIA when he was reposted to Rangoon, Moscow, and New Delhi. Polyakov was suddenly recalled to Moscow in 1980, arrested, tried, and finally executed in 1988.
Gu Shunzhang, born Gu Fengming was an early leader, spymaster, and defector of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Sent to Soviet Russia to train in espionage, Gu was chosen by Zhou Enlai to lead the CCP's first intelligence service, the Central Special Branch. After he was captured by the Kuomintang (KMT), Gu defected and revealed to the KMT intelligence all he knew of Zhou Enlai's underground communist spy network earning him a reputation as "the most dangerous traitor in the history of the CCP."
David W. Doyle was a British-born American author, United States Army Veteran, and former Central Intelligence Agency officer.
Victor Ivanovich Sheymov was a Russian computer security expert, author and patent holder of computer security innovations. A former intelligence official with the rank of major in the Soviet KGB, Sheymov defected to the United States in May 1980, choosing to come out of hiding a decade later.
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Vertefeuille is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
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The Assets is an eight-part American drama television miniseries that aired on ABC in 2014. The series was based on the book Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed by retired CIA officers Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille. The series was executively produced by Morgan Hertzan, Rudy Bednar and Andrew Chapman. The pilot episode earned a 0.7 rating in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic, making The Assets the lowest rated drama premiere ever on one of the big three networks.
Jeanne Ruth Vertefeuille was a CIA officer who participated in a small team that investigated and uncovered the actions of Aldrich Ames, a notorious Cold War spy.
Valery Martynov was a double agent working as a Soviet KGB officer as well as an intelligence asset for the US. While serving as a Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB, he was stationed in 1980 at the Soviet official offices in Washington, D.C. By 1982, he had become a double agent and was passing intelligence to the CIA and FBI under the code name "Gentile". He was executed in Moscow on May 28, 1987, at the age of 41.
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