The Ames Mailbox

The Ames Mailbox was a postal box at the corner of 37th and R Streets NW, on the northern edge of Georgetown, that the CIA officer Aldrich Ames used to signal his Soviet handlers. A chalk mark on it, at a site called SMILE in his own files, told the KGB that he was coming to a meeting. Ames, a counterintelligence officer, had been selling secrets to Moscow since 1985, and his information exposed Soviet officials secretly working for the United States, at least ten of whom were executed.

By the autumn of 1993 the FBI was watching him. A search of his house on 9 October found a computer file naming the mailbox as a signal site, and on 12 October a wiretap caught him saying he would put a signal down early the next morning. On 13 October agents saw him leave home at about 6:22 and return at about 6:44, and at about 7:00 they found a horizontal chalk mark on the box. By afternoon it had been wiped off. The mark confirmed a meeting with Russian intelligence in Bogota in early November 1993, his last.

The FBI arrested Ames outside his home in Arlington, Virginia, on 21 February 1994, and searchers later found ten pieces of chalk in the house and his car. He pleaded guilty on 28 April 1994 and was sentenced to life in prison, having been paid an estimated $2.5 million. The original mailbox went to the International Spy Museum when it opened in 2002.