February 22, 1994: The Aldrich Ames Spy Scandal

February 22, 1994: The Aldrich Ames spy scandal breaks, as it is revealed that he and his wife were arrested on espionage charges the day before.

Then 52 years old, the Wisconsin native had worked for the CIA since 1962. He served in Ankara, the capital of Turkey; CIA headquarters in the Washington suburb of Langley, Virginia, where he worked in the Soviet-East European Division; then in New York, where he handled Soviet assets who had been "turned"; then in Mexico City.

His time in Mexico led to an affair, which ended his marriage and left him in debt. His CIA salary wasn't paying enough to cover this. So, using his contacts with the Soviet Union, in 1985, he began selling them information he considered "essentially valueless." By 1989, the CIA was on to him, but they had to have enough evidence to prove his guilt. That took until 1994, by which point he was still sending secrets to the successor state to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation.

When the scandal broke, conservatives tried to blame it on the President in office at the time, liberal Democrat Bill Clinton, and question Clinton's loyalty to America and his opposition to Communism (even though the Soviet Union had already broken up). It never occurred to them to blame the President in office at the time Ames' treason began in 1985, conservative Republican Ronald Reagan.

As of February 22, 2022, Ames is 70 years old, serving a life sentence at the Federal Prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. (UPDATE: He died in 2026, having never been released.)

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February 22, 1994 was a Tuesday. Baseball and football were out of season. There were 8 games played in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks lost to the Seattle Supersonics, 93-82 at Madison Square Garden.

* The New Jersey Nets lost to the Miami Heat, 123-97 at the Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands.

* The Houston Rockets beat the Denver Nuggets, 98-97 at The Summit in Houston. (It's now the Central Campus of televangelist Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church.) Hakeem Olajuwon scored 33 points.

* The Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Minnesota Timberwolves, 114-81 at The Coliseum in the Cleveland suburb of Richfield, Ohio.

* The Indiana Pacers beat the Dallas Stars, 107-101 at the Market Square Arena in Indianapolis.

* The Golden State Warriors beat the Milwaukee Bucks, 117-113 at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee. Latrell Sprewell, a Milwaukee native, scored 34 for the Warriors.

* The Sacramento Kings beat the Boston Celtics, 95-93 at the ARCO Arena in Sacramento.

* And the Portland Trail Blazers beat the Los Angeles Clippers, 120-117 at the Portland Memorial Coliseum. Despite the defeat, Danny Manning of the Clippers led all scorers on the night with 35.

And there were 2 games in the NHL. This was during a time of experimentation for the NHL, of putting games in neutral sites, to see which cities might be ready to support expansion or moved teams. The Florida Panthers beat the Winnipeg Jets, 3-2 at the Copps Coliseum (now named the FirstOntario Centre) in Hamilton, Ontario. And the Calgary Flames and the Vancouver Canucks played to a 4-4 tie at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver.