Sandy Grimes obituary: CIA analyst who helped to catch traitor

Times

a day ago

In 1991, after three decades with the CIA, Sandy Grimes was winding down in anticipation of her retirement. Then a request came for her to take on one last assignment. It involved Dmitri Polyakov, a Soviet general who had been the CIA's highest-ranking double agent during the Cold War. Grimes had been one of the analysts working on the intelligence he had provided. Then he had gone 'silent' in 1986 along with at least eight other CIA 'assets'. It later emerged that they had been tried for treason by the Soviets and executed.
At the time Grimes had been chief of the CIA's Africa branch, and in response to the disappearance of the assets she had been tasked with a large-scale (though secret) overhaul of security procedures. Would she stay on to investigate who in the CIA had betrayed Polyakov? ' 'Without hesitation,' I replied. They had made me the only offer I could have never refused,' she said. 'Our dead sources deserved advocates and so began my participation in what later became known as the Ames mole hunt.'
Joining a team of four, Grimes investigated what had gone wrong — there had either been a mole in the CIA or their system had been hacked. It was exhausting work that eventually led them to Aldrich Ames, the CIA's counterintelligence chief for Soviet operations.
Ames and Grimes had been friends since the early Seventies, when they were case officers together. 'We grew up together,' she recalled. 'We car-pooled. I had seen what I always called the old Rick. I liked him and if anybody had ever told me in the 1970s that Rick Ames would be one of the most famous spies of all time for the opposition, I never would have believed it, never in a million years.'
Although she recalled how much he changed in the mid-Eighties — 'It wasn't the capped teeth, it wasn't the clean fingernails, it wasn't the Italian suits and the $600 shoes and the silk men's hose,' she said. 'His posture was different. He stood erect. He exuded arrogance' — she needed concrete evidence.
This came through methodically and retrospectively documenting Ames's every move: where he went for lunch with his Soviet contacts, his cigarette breaks, his credit card charges. The final breakthrough came when they discovered that on May 17, 1985, Ames had reported a lunch with his contact, Sergey Dmitriyevich Chuvakhin, the first secretary of the Soviet embassy in Washington. The following day there was a deposit into his bank account for $9,000, one of three such payments. 'It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell what is going on here,' she said to colleagues. 'Rick is a goddamn Russian spy.' Ames was arrested in 1994 and handed a life sentence without parole.
The mole hunt was a masterclass in data-collecting — it was the first time a spy had been discovered through sheer analysis — but there was congressional wrath over how long it had taken the CIA to catch him. And Grimes, for her part, had a hard time understanding his motivations beyond the money (he sold the CIA's secrets for a reported $2.7 million). 'I think Rick has always wanted to be special, to be important,' she proposed. 'I do know he felt himself intellectually superior to all of us. His career was not going anywhere. He was not being recognised for his abilities. And maybe this was revenge.'
Sandra Joyce Venable was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1945, 'a certified product of the Cold War', in her words. Her parents, Isaac and Mary (née Twitty), were Tennessee natives who met working on the Manhattan Project, the covert project during the Second World War to develop the world's first atomic bomb.
Schooling began in Los Alamos, in the hills of New Mexico. From there Sandy moved to Denver, Colorado, where she attended a string of schools before leaving for college in 1963. Swapping physics for a Russian language course, she joined the Slavic languages department of the University of Washington, one of few women on the course. She was recruited to the CIA four years later — out of sheer luck, she noted, rather than any wish to travel or sense of patriotic duty to serve her country. She had run into an old boyfriend one afternoon who said that the CIA was recruiting on campus and that she would make a 'perfect spy'.
Assigned to the Soviet Bloc division as a secretary, her first case was to cover Polyakov. 'I was what I described as the low man on the totem pole,' recalled Grimes, who ran the Xerox machine and filed 'personality information' that Polyakov reported on Soviets on a typewriter that she didn't know how to use. 'I used Scotch tape and scissors to extract his reporting on particular subjects,' she said, 'and I cut and pasted.'
Gradually handed more responsibility, she was eventually made a senior intelligence analyst and converted to 'professional status' in 1970. During the interview she was asked if she planned on getting pregnant, for motherhood, the officer said, would probably end her career. 'Taken aback by the inappropriateness of such a question,' said Grimes, who sported an Anna Wintour bob and steely, measured gaze to match, 'I responded by inquiring as to his plans for additional children.' Shortly afterwards she gave birth to two daughters, neither of whom compromised her career.
As an officer in the Soviet division for the next 11 years she was brought, one by one, into the cases of Soviet assets until in 1981 she transferred to career management staff: it was a relief to shift from a world of spies to 'secretarial-clerical personnel management', she said, though it was also, pointedly, the year that the CIA lost contact with Polyakov. A year earlier he had left a posting in Delhi on what they assumed would be a short trip to Moscow. 'He did not return,' she said. 'I waited for a year, hoping he would reappear in the West or re-establish contact with us in Moscow, but there was silence.'
By 1983 Grimes was back on the front line of CIA activity against the Soviets as chief of operations in Africa, the division in which Ames worked. At the time the CIA's operations against the Soviets were successful — they knew more about the KGB, Grimes said, than most individuals within it — and they had no indication of the 'impending disaster'.
By the end of 1985 four agents had been arrested and Grimes was tasked with overhauling the staff communications system within the division. Cable traffic between HQ and the field stations was scrapped: case officers would indirectly travel to meet a source in a safe house and transfer encrypted notes back to Washington from a laptop. Grimes led the operation, which became known as the 'back room', at the same time as heading the Africa division. By the late 1980s she had been made chief of the Soviet and east European branch.
She is survived by her husband, Gary Grimes, and two daughters: Kelly and Tracy.+
In 2012 Grimes published an account of the mole hunt, Circle of Treason, with her colleague Jeanne Vertefeuille. The Ames case always felt personal for her. Polyakov had been her first 'teacher' and his execution in 1988 made her reflect on the nature of her work. 'I was devastated,' she said. 'He became a personal friend. I thought he would have survived. It was a terrible, terrible reminder of the seriousness of what we did for a living.'
Sandy Grimes, CIA chief, was born on August 10, 1945. She died from complications of Alzheimer's disease on July 25, 2025, aged 79