Wife of CIA Double Agent Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison : Espionage: Rosario Ames asks for leniency, portraying herself as a victim. But prosecutors call her a ‘greedy spouse’ who aided her husband.

Rejecting her plea for leniency, a federal judge Friday sentenced a tearful Rosario Ames to five years, three months in prison for conspiring to commit espionage and evading taxes on $2.5 million in spy payments earned by her husband, former CIA agent Aldrich H. Ames.

Speaking to a packed courtroom in a halting voice choked with emotion, Mrs. Ames told U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton: “I offer you no excuses for my conduct--only explanations.”

Dressed in green fatigues with “Alexandria Jail” stenciled in white, she insisted that she had been manipulated by her husband and kept in the dark about details of his spying for the Soviet Union and later Russia over eight years. She said she only learned of his activities by accident in 1992, although she acknowledged providing some “advice and support.”

“I never knew exactly what my husband was doing or how he was doing it,” she said. “I never knew or met his Russian handlers.”

Calling her husband of nine years “a master liar and manipulator,” she declared that “exactly those qualities that made him a good intelligence officer for our country made him a deadly tool in the hands of the Russians.”

Officials have termed the Ames spy case one of the most damaging in U.S. history but have declined to specify what U.S. secrets and overseas operations Ames, 52, has acknowledged compromising between 1985 and 1994. They have disclosed, however, that he caused the deaths of as many as a dozen Soviet and Eastern Bloc officials who were cooperating with the CIA by revealing their identities to his Soviet counterparts.

In his court-approved plea agreement last May, Ames accepted a term of life in prison without parole on condition that his wife receive about five years in prison for her role, subject to his cooperation with authorities in outlining his activities. He is now serving his sentence in Allenwood federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania. In the same agreement, Mrs. Ames said she would not challenge a government recommendation that she serve a sentence of 63 to 72 months. But in recent weeks she had hired a new attorney and began efforts to persuade the judge to be more lenient.

Hilton’s sentence amounted to the low end of that spread--63 months. John P. Hume, Mrs. Ames’ attorney, told reporters that she would be credited with eight months already served since the couple’s arrest last February and that she also could get 45 days a year off her sentence for good behavior. Thus, she could be released in less than four years from now.

Besides picturing herself as a victim, Mrs. Ames pleaded for leniency so that she could resume raising the couple’s 5-year-old son, Paul, who moved to Bogota, Colombia, to live with Mrs. Ames’ mother after his parents’ arrest. “I beg you, your honor, Paul needs me. Paul is innocent,” she told Hilton. “He did nothing wrong.”

Hume said he would ask the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to incarcerate Mrs. Ames at the federal institution at Danbury, Conn., an easy drive from New York City. This would make it easier for the child and her mother to visit her in prison, since flights from Bogota to New York are quite frequent, Hume told reporters.

“We’re not surprised by the sentence,” Hume said outside the courthouse. “We hoped the judge would consider mitigating circumstances but he chose not to do so.”

Defense attorney Plato Cacheris, who attended the sentencing as Aldrich Ames’ lawyer, said afterward that his client had no objection to Mrs. Ames’ harsh characterization of him. “It’s understandable under the circumstances. He would not disagree with it,” Cacheris said.

Before Hilton imposed sentence, Mark J. Hulkower, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the Ameses and signed their plea agreement, challenged Mrs. Ames’ portrayal of herself as a victim.

Calling her “a greedy spouse,” Hulkower said that her statements “are at odds with the facts of the conspiracy.”

“Mrs. Ames was concerned about one thing and one thing only, that Rick Ames get their money from the KGB. Is this how she expressed her opposition to the conspiracy? She lived a life of luxury with money from the KGB.”

Hulkower noted that he and FBI agents had listened to thousands of hours of secretly recorded phone conversations between the Ameses for the nine months they were under surveillance before their arrest.

“She says now she was blackmailed and pressured, but not once does she tell her husband to get out of this dirty business,” the prosecutor said. “She does tell him to be more imaginative in carrying the documents and the money.”

In a related development, the CIA on Friday released a 23-page unclassified abstract of its inspector general’s report on the Ames case, an inquiry requested by the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee shortly after the Ameses’ arrests.

While the report by Frederick P. Hitz did not significantly add to what had already been disclosed about his investigation, it was blunt in its condemnation of agency failures to detect its most damaging mole at least two years earlier.

“His professional weaknesses were observed by Ames’ colleagues and supervisors and were tolerated by many who did not consider them highly unusual for Directorate of Operations officers on the ‘not going anywhere’ promotion track,” Hitz wrote.

“That an officer with these observed vulnerabilities should have been given counterintelligence responsibilities in Soviet operations where he was in a prime position to learn of the intimate details of the agency’s most sensitive operations, contact Soviet officials openly and then massively betray his trust is difficult to justify,” Hitz wrote.