CIA Appears Convinced Spy Ames Has Nothing Left to Tell : Espionage: Former agency official names no other ‘moles’ or accomplices, sources say. Cooperation is meant to win leniency for his wife.

In five months of intensive questioning, convicted CIA spy Aldrich H. Ames has convinced U.S. officials that he knows of no other “moles” operating in the intelligence agency and that he had no witting accomplices in providing national security secrets to Russia, sources familiar with the case said Wednesday.

A team of interrogators from the FBI and the CIA has concluded that Ames has cooperated in their “damage assessment” by disclosing all information he provided to the former Soviet Union and later Russia and how he obtained it. They also have decided, after some initial doubts, that he did not hold back on identifying a key Soviet “handler” with whom he dealt, the sources said.

The acceptance of Ames’ statements as credible is expected to result Friday in a recommendation by federal prosecutors that Ames’ wife, Rosario, receive a lenient sentence of about five years imprisonment. This term was negotiated with the couple last spring on the condition that Ames exhibit “full cooperation” during his subsequent debriefing sessions.

Under terms of the agreement, the 52-year-old Ames, who rose to chief of Soviet counterintelligence in the CIA’s Soviet-East European division during 31 years with the agency, pleaded guilty in April to conspiracy to commit espionage. Rosario Ames, 41, pleaded guilty to “aiding, advising and encouraging” his activities.

Ames was immediately sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, the harshest punishment possible under current law. U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton, at the request of all parties, deferred Rosario Ames’ sentencing on the lesser offense pending her husband’s cooperation. That will take place Friday in Hilton’s courtroom in nearby Alexandria, Va.

William B. Cummings, Rosario Ames’ attorney, said he had been told informally by prosecutors that the government would not oppose her being sentenced to the low end of the range in the plea-bargaining agreement, which called for 63 months to 72 months. Because she already has been imprisoned seven months, that would mean she might have slightly less than five years left to serve, he said.

Cummings said he is hopeful she will be sent to a low-security prison camp, which would allow visits by the Ames’ 5-year-old son, Paul, who now is living in Bogota, Colombia, with his grandmother. Colombian citizenship has been applied for by the boy, and there are no plans for him to return to the United States other than for visits, according to Cummings.

Ames has publicly acknowledged that beginning in 1985, he gave the KGB the names of about a dozen U.S. and allied-paid Soviet and East European intelligence agents--as well as hundreds of classified documents dealing with U.S. surveillance of the East Bloc. In return, he received an estimated $2.5 million in cash payments from the Russians over an eight-year period.

Federal sources, citing the sensitivity of their closed-door talks with Ames, refused to disclose the details of his admissions during their thrice-weekly sessions, which began in the Washington area last spring but were moved a month ago when Ames was transferred from the Alexandria City Jail to a new high-security wing of the Allenwood federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania.

But the sources did say that Ames provided some insights into the mistake-plagued KGB. For example, he related that his handlers apologized to him for their government’s too-swift execution or removal of Soviet officials who cooperated with the United States--officials Ames identified in 1985.

Noting that the sudden elimination of these sources might have jeopardized Ames by tipping off the CIA to the existence of a mole, Ames’ handlers reportedly blamed the action on a “screw-up” by higher officials in their agency.

Ames also gave his questioners a full description of his principal Soviet contact. But he had to overcome their initial doubts, the sources said, when his description did not fit that of any known Russian intelligence agent.

Ames failed to pick out the man he described from many photos shown to him, and an FBI artist’s sketch of the alleged contact proved of no help to his interrogators. But when Ames said he met with the agent in Bogota last November, FBI officials remembered they had Ames under video surveillance at the time.

When film of that surveillance was retrieved, sources said, Ames pointed to the man who suddenly approached him at a shopping mall--and his credibility with his questioners was restored.

Sources said many of Ames’ statements paralleled those he made in May in a jailhouse interview with Times reporters. In it, he said it had been “really easy” for him to obtain top-secret information from the CIA without the aid of any knowing accomplice, in view of his long years of service and a breakdown in security procedures at the agency.

Even after his transfer to counter-narcotics work--an area of little interest to his Soviet handlers--Ames said in the interview that he obtained sensitive data from other departments.

He attributed this to the advent of computers and databases and the growth of a CIA bureaucracy in which “everybody has to coordinate with everything.” He told The Times that this had left outmoded the former system in which CIA officers were supposed to work in tight information “compartments.”

While perhaps consoling to CIA officials that Ames knows of no other traitors in their midst, his debriefing sessions may hasten the day that heads will roll, some sources said. Frederick Hitz, the agency’s inspector general, has been trying to learn where breakdowns in CIA security occurred and how officials ignored warnings that Ames showed signs of sudden wealth in the late 1980s, paying cash for a $540,000 split-level home in suburban Virginia and purchasing a new $49,500 Jaguar automobile.

Senior officials in the agency’s operations directorate who had supervisory authority over Ames are said to be among the targets of Hitz’s investigation. CIA Director R. James Woolsey also is under pressure from Congress to institute reforms.

Ames, meanwhile, is clinging to a seemingly vain hope that despite his no-parole life sentence, he may regain his freedom one day, according to a family friend. “He thinks some political development may occur years from now, or that the Russians may be instrumental in getting him released,” the friend said.

“No one else, however, believes this will happen.”

Ames is being held in “administrative detention,” which means he is segregated from other prisoners for his own protection, a source familiar with his status said.

“Spies and traitors are not very popular in a prison population, and there are some pretty tough prisoners at Allenwood who are Vietnam veterans,” one source said.