Confessed spy Aldrich Ames says there probably are other moles inside the CIA but insists his own actions did not damage U.S. national security "in any significant way."
The ex-Central Intelligence Agency official is serving a life prison term for selling secrets to Moscow for more than eight years until his arrest last February. His wife, Rosario, is serving a five-year prison term.He was interviewed for one hour by a CNN team for a program to air Tuesday night.
Ames said he hopes to go free some day despite his sentence to life imprisonment without parole.
"I don't think you can live otherwise," Ames said in the interview taped at the federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pa.
Asked if he believed there were other moles still inside the CIA, Ames said, "Probably."
CIA Director James Woolsey has called Ames a "warped, murdering traitor." Several of the Soviet and East European double-agents he unmasked were executed.
But Ames sought to play down the damage he inflicted.
"While I betrayed my public trust, I don't believe that that betrayal damaged our national security in any significant way," Ames said.
He said the United States "historically had hardly any agents who ever reported any valuable or significant political information on what was happening in the Soviet Union."
While some of the double-agents were executed, Ames said, others "have been released from jail or finished their jail terms and are out."
And these double-agents "identified a lot of American or British agents of the KGB who are now doing jail time in Britain and this country and elsewhere," he said.
Ames said he passed CIA lie detector tests by staying calm and following the Soviets' advice to develop "a good rapport" with the person administering the polygraph.
Asked if he had anything to say to his Russian handlers, Ames said, "I have a lot of respect for them and gratitude. They worked real hard and they did everything they could . . . from their point of view, to take good care of me."
His motivation for walking into the Soviet Embassy in Washington in April 1985 was "greed, weakness (and) fear," Ames said.
He got $50,000 for giving the Soviets what he considered "fake information" - a list of Soviets who had volunteered to help the CIA but who were actually working for the KGB. He said he fully intended to stop after pulling that "scam."
"It was after that in a much less conscious sort of process that I took the deeper plunge and gave real agents up," said Ames, who bought a Jaguar automobile and fancy home with the $2 million the Soviets later paid him.
"I should have been much more careful," said Ames.
Ames cried when asked about his 6-year-old son, Paul, now living with his wife's parents in her native Colombia.
"There's a tremendous amount of grief and remorse that I have to deal with," he said. "There's a sense in which I have perhaps died for him."