AP 02/23 00:31 EST Millions Said Paid To CIA Spy Copyright 1994. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. WASHINGTON (AP) -- The KGB develops a mole in the top ranks of the CIA, state secrets are spilled, double agents are fingered, million- dollar payoffs are made, and FBI agents skulk through a suspect's household trash to find clues. And that's just the opening chapter in one of the biggest espionage cases in CIA history. The Justice Department on Tuesday charged Aldrich Hazen Ames and his wife, Rosario, with conspiracy to commit espionage. Ames, a 31- year CIA veteran and former senior Soviet counterintelligence officer, is accused of selling U.S. national security secrets to Moscow for eight years starting in 1985. A federal magistrate ordered the Ameses held without bail until a hearing on Friday. If convicted on the conspiracy charge, they could face life in prison. Neither of them spoke to reporters when they left the magistrate's office. President Clinton called the case a "very serious" breach of U.S. national security. Sources familiar with Ames' CIA career said he compromised more than one Soviet double agent, including a KGB counterintelligence investigations officer -- code named GTPROLOGUE -- who was feeding information to the CIA. Ames had access to vast amounts of classified information at the CIA. And because during at least part of his long CIA career he specialized in recruiting Soviet officials and intelligence officers as spies, he would have been able to disclose to the Soviets the identities of CIA agents inside the Soviet Union. The Justice Department wrote in an affidavit released Tuesday that Ames, 52, began spying for the Soviets in 1985 at a time when he was the chief of the Soviet Counterintelligence Branch in the CIA's Soviet-East European Division. He is accused of continuing his espionage until his arrest on Monday. Ames' wife, Rosario, 41, is a part-time student at Georgetown University. The affidavit said she was a paid informant for the CIA from about April-December 1983 while serving as a cultural attache in Mexico City. Ames met her while working for the CIA in Mexico City from 1981-83. They were married in 1985. They have a young son. William Rhoads, who lives across the street from the Ames home in a well-to-do section of suburban Arlington, Va., told reporters Tuesday that they seemed an unexceptional couple who appeared to have income beyond Ames' government job. Indeed, the Ameses spent money at an extraordinary clip, yet they apparently raised few if any suspicions by paying cash for the $540,000 Arlington home in 1989 when he was transferred to Washington from a CIA post in Rome. His CIA job paid $69,000 a year. Court documents said they also spent $99,000 on improvements to the house through July 1993 and $7,000 on furniture in the first four months they owned the house. They also spent $25,000 toward the purchase of a Jaguar automobile in January 1992, $19,500 on a new 1989 Honda, $165,000 on stocks and securities from 1985-93, and put an average of more than $500 a month on credit cards over that eight-year period. The court documents also said that from 1986 through 1993, the Ameses transferred by wire -- mostly from Credit Suisse bank accounts in Switzerland -- more than $1 million to their Dominion Bank of Virginia accounts. They deposited an additional $487,100 in cash in various local accounts from 1985-93. "This investigation has determined that none of this $1,538,685, consisting of the wire and cash deposits, was derived from any salary checks of the CIA payable to Aldrich Ames," the affidavit said. The couple also own two condominium apartments and a farm in Colombia, the records said, and large sums of money were sent to Colombia by Ames to maintain those holdings. The Colombia connection figures prominently in the Ames case. Besides the fact that Rosario Ames was born in Colombia and was working in the Colombian Embassy when she met Aldrich Ames, he also apparently met Soviet contacts there at least once. The affidavit said U.S. investigators believe Ames received a cash payment from the Russian foreign intelligence service during a meeting in Bogota in November 1993.