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Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer who became one of the most damaging double agents in United States history, has died at the age of 84.
The former counterintelligence officer, who was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, died on Monday at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, CBS News, the BBC's US media partner, reported.
Ames was imprisoned on April 28, 1994, after admitting to selling classified information to the Soviet Union and later Russia. He compromised more than 100 clandestine operations and revealed the identities of over 30 agents spying for the West, leading to the deaths of at least 10 CIA intelligence sources.
Seeking money to pay off debts, Ames said that in April 1985 he began giving the KGB the names of CIA spies, receiving an initial payment of $50,000. Known to the KGB by the codename Kolokol (“Bell”), Ames went on to identify almost all of the CIA spies in the Soviet Union, for which he was handsomely rewarded.
“To my continued surprise, the KGB replied that it had set aside $2 million for me as a reward for the information,” he said in an eight-page statement he read to the court. Over nine years, Ames admitted to receiving a total of about $2.5 million from the Soviet Union for betraying the United States.
The money financed a lavish lifestyle. Ames bought a new Jaguar, took vacations abroad, and bought a $540,000 house, even though his salary never exceeded $70,000 a year. Ames' 31-year career with the CIA began when his father, a CIA analyst, helped him get a job there after he dropped out of college in 1962.
He married his first wife, CIA agent Nancy Segebarth, in 1969, before being sent to Turkey as a counterintelligence officer to recruit foreign agents. Three years later he returned to the US, where his drinking problems began to surface and his marriage began to fall apart. Despite several security breaches over the years, including leaving a bag full of classified documents on the subway, Ames was sent to Mexico City in 1981.
There he met his second wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, a cultural attaché at the Colombian embassy and a CIA asset who was later accused of being his collaborator. After returning to the US in 1983, Ames became head of the CIA's Soviet counterintelligence department, despite ongoing concerns about his alcohol consumption.
While his career was taking off, his personal life was deteriorating. In addition to monthly support for his first wife, he also financed Rosario's lifestyle, including her passion for shopping. It was his mounting debts that led him to sell off the wealth of secrets he had at his disposal.
“It was about the money, and I don’t think he ever seriously tried to convince people that it was anything more than that,” FBI agent Leslie G. Wiser, involved in the investigation that led to Ames’ arrest, told the BBC’s Witness History program in 2015.
His betrayal began in 1985, when he gave the Soviets the names of several KGB officers who were secretly working for the FBI in exchange for $50,000. His espionage continued for nine years, until his arrest on February 21, 1994, after a manhunt for the “mole” had begun to narrow the year before.
Ames cooperated with authorities in exchange for a plea deal that secured a lighter sentence for Rosario. She admitted to knowing about the money and his meetings with the Soviets and was released after five years. The CIA director at the time, R. James Woolsey, described Ames as “a vicious traitor to his country.” Woolsey said the agents Ames betrayed died because “a murderous traitor wanted a bigger house and a Jaguar.”
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