Aldrich Ames, the former Central Intelligence Agency officer who became one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history, died Monday at age 84 while serving a life sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland. According to the FBI, Ames, a 31-year CIA veteran and Russian-speaking officer who specialized in Russian intelligence services, began passing classified information to the KGB in 1985, compromising numerous CIA and FBI human sources, some of whom were later executed. He was arrested in 1994 and pleaded guilty to espionage charges, receiving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Ames secretly provided classified materials to the KGB using “dead drops,” concealed locations where documents were left to be retrieved by Soviet intelligence officers operating from the USSR Embassy in Washington. “Well, the reasons that I did what I did in April of 1985, were personal, banal, and amounted really to kind of greed and folly. As simple as that,” Ames said in an archived interview with the National Security Archive at George Washington University. “I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution, and capital punishment.”
According to Wes Street, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, Ames compromised over 100 Soviet and East European cases and received $2.5 million in payments from the KGB, with another $2.1 million held for him in a Moscow bank.