Aldrich Ames mole hunt sessions

Between roughly 1985 and 1994, the Central Intelligence Agency was searching for an internal source of leaks that was causing the deaths of CIA assets inside the Soviet Union. The mole turned out to be Aldrich Ames, a senior officer in the agency's Soviet division, who was arrested by the FBI on February 21, 1994.

The intervening nine years were one of the agency's longest sustained internal mole hunts. A small team of officers worked the case through traditional counterintelligence methods: comparing the timing of asset losses against the personnel and travel records of officers who had access to those assets' identities; running surveillance on officers who came under suspicion; reviewing financial records and personal behavior. The investigation produced several false leads before converging on Ames.

The role of the Stargate remote-viewing program in this period is contested. The published account most often cited in popular treatments suggests that Stargate viewers were tasked against the mole-hunt question at various points and produced indications consistent with Ames's profile. The released archive contains no session report that names Ames or describes a target whose description would later be matched to him. If the program was tasked on the mole-hunt question, the session files either remain redacted or are filed under target identifiers that have not been correlated to the case.

This is one of the cases where what the popular Stargate literature says and what the declassified record supports are not the same thing. The most honest reading of the available evidence is that we do not have a documented Stargate contribution to the Ames investigation, but the question has not been settled either way by the 2017 release.

Ames pleaded guilty in April 1994. He is serving a life sentence.