Sandra Grimes, the CIA analyst whose meticulous work led to the capture of the agency’s most damaging mole, died on July 25, 2025, at her home in Great Falls, Virginia. She was 79. According to The Washington Post, the cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, which she was diagnosed with in 2024, as confirmed by her daughter, Tracy Hobiena.
Grimes’s career in the CIA spanned nearly three decades, much of it spent in the shadowy world of Cold War espionage. Her pivotal role in unmasking Aldrich Ames, a high-ranking CIA counterintelligence officer who betrayed American secrets to the Soviet Union, stands as a testament to her tenacity and analytical prowess. As NPR reported, Grimes was on the verge of scaling back her career in 1991 after more than 20 years of service, eager to spend more time with her family. "I was not old enough at the time to retire," she recalled in an interview for the National Security Archive at George Washington University, "but I was satisfied professionally. I had a family that I wanted to spend more time with."
But fate—and her sense of duty—intervened. In the mid-1980s, the CIA was rocked by the mysterious disappearance of its Soviet informants. As The Washington Post detailed, by the middle of 1985, nearly every month brought news that another American asset in the Soviet Union had vanished. Many of these informants were later found to have been identified, interrogated, and, in many cases, executed. The losses were a chilling reminder of the stakes involved in the intelligence world. "It was a terrible, terrible reminder of the seriousness of what we did for a living," Grimes told the National Security Archive. "We owed all these people who had made the sacrifice."
In early 1991, Grimes was preparing to retire when her supervisor asked her to stay on for one more assignment: to help her colleague Jeanne Vertefeuille investigate why so many of the CIA’s Russian informants had been wiped out. As she wrote in her memoir, "Circle of Treason," co-authored with Vertefeuille, "Without hesitation I replied that he made me the only offer I could have never refused. Our dead sources deserved advocates."
Born Sandra Joyce Venable on August 10, 1945, in Poughkeepsie, New York, Grimes grew up in a family deeply connected to science and national service. Her father was an MIT-trained engineer, and her mother served in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. The couple met while working on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, before moving the family to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and later to the Denver suburbs. Despite her father’s scientific leanings, Grimes charted her own path, choosing Russian over physics in high school and later majoring in Russian at the University of Washington. Her journey into espionage began almost by chance, after a chance encounter with a CIA recruiter. Weeks after graduating in 1967, she joined the agency, one of its few female employees at the time.
Grimes’s early years at the CIA were marked by both professional success and the casual sexism of the era. During a 1970 internal job interview, a senior officer questioned her about her plans for motherhood, suggesting her career would be over if she decided to have children. Grimes, never one to shy from confrontation, shot back by asking about his plans for more children. She got the promotion.
Specializing in Soviet intelligence, Grimes worked under Jeanne Vertefeuille, who in 1986 was tasked with investigating the disappearance of Soviet agents. Around the same time, Grimes was assigned to help keep the remaining informants alive. The two began sharing information, eventually forming a small, tight-knit team of "mole hunters."
Aldrich Ames, known to colleagues as "Rick," was the CIA’s counterintelligence chief for Soviet operations. He was a familiar figure to Grimes—she even used to carpool with him. But by 1989, suspicions about Ames began to mount. As The Washington Post recounted, the team noticed his sudden acquisition of a Jaguar sports car and a half-million-dollar home in Arlington, Virginia—extravagances far beyond a civil servant’s salary. Yet, the tip was initially set aside as more urgent cases demanded attention.
It wasn’t until 1992 that Grimes, digging into Ames’s finances and personal life, began to unravel the truth. She pored over key card swipes, bank statements, and appointments, noticing a troubling pattern: after lunches with a Soviet diplomat, Ames would deposit thousands of dollars into his bank account. "Well, three matches don't make a conviction, but in my mind, Rick was the spy," she later told the National Security Archive. In her memoir, she put it even more bluntly: "It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell what is going on here. Rick is a goddamn Russian spy."
The FBI soon took over the investigation, placing Ames under surveillance and even tapping his phone at CIA headquarters. On Presidents’ Day, February 21, 1994, Ames was arrested after nearly a decade of selling secrets to the Soviets. He pleaded guilty to espionage, admitting to taking millions of dollars from Moscow. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ames caused "more damage to the national security of the United States than any spy in the history of the CIA." He is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Ames, was sentenced in October 1994 to a five-year prison term for assisting him, despite her tearful plea for mercy.
Grimes’s story didn’t end with Ames’s conviction. After retiring from the CIA, she co-authored "Circle of Treason" with Vertefeuille, chronicling the painstaking investigation that brought Ames down. The book was later adapted into the 2014 ABC miniseries "The Assets," with Jodie Whittaker portraying Grimes. At a panel discussion at the International Spy Museum, Grimes noted the show’s fidelity to real events—except, she joked, for a scene in which her character flips pancakes for her family before work. "Me? Flipping pancakes like that? Noooo."
Despite her clandestine career, Grimes was a devoted wife, mother, and grandmother. She is survived by her husband of 56 years, Gary Grimes; two daughters, Tracy Hobiena and Kelly Cooper; two sisters; and four grandchildren. Her family recalled the unique challenges of growing up with a mother who was a spy. "She lived two lives," Hobiena told The Washington Post. "It was a completely secret life, so she couldn’t come home and mourn" the loss of Russian informants. Hobiena recounted the futility of trying to outsmart her mother as a teenager: "My mom was a spy. We got away with nothing."
Sandra Grimes’s legacy is one of courage, intelligence, and quiet heroism. Her work not only brought a traitor to justice but also honored the memory of those who risked—and lost—everything in the clandestine struggle between East and West.