Aldrich Ames, CIA officer who sold US secrets to the Soviets, dies aged 84
Aldrich Ames, one of the most damaging double agents in CIA US intelligence history, has died at the age of 84 while serving a life sentence in a federal prison.
Ames, a former CIA counterintelligence officer, died on Monday at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US media partner. The US Bureau of Prisons confirmed his death.
He was jailed in April 1994 after admitting to selling highly classified information to the Soviet Union and later Russia, betraying dozens of Western intelligence assets and severely crippling US espionage operations behind the Iron Curtain.
A betrayal that cost lives
During nearly a decade of espionage, Ames compromised more than 100 clandestine operations and revealed the identities of more than 30 agents spying for the West. At least 10 CIA assets were executed as a direct result of his disclosures.
Seeking money to deal with mounting personal debts, Ames first approached the KGB in April 1985. He handed over the names of CIA spies in exchange for an initial payment of $50,000.
Known to the KGB by the code name Kolokol, meaning The Bell, Ames went on to identify almost all US agents operating inside the Soviet Union.
“To my enduring surprise, the KGB replied that it had set aside for me $2 million in gratitude for the information,” Ames said in an eight page statement read to the court at his sentencing.
Over nine years, he received about $2.5m for his betrayal.
Lavish lifestyle raised suspicions
The money funded a lifestyle far beyond his means. Despite never earning more than $70,000 a year, Ames bought a Jaguar, took foreign holidays and purchased a $540,000 home.
Ames joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1962 after his father, also a CIA analyst, helped him secure a job following his decision to drop out of college.
He married fellow CIA officer Nancy Segebarth in 1969 and was posted to Turkey to recruit foreign agents. After returning to the United States, his career became increasingly troubled, marked by alcohol abuse and security violations, including once leaving a briefcase of classified documents on a subway.
Despite these incidents, Ames was sent to Mexico City in 1981, where he met his second wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, a cultural attaché at the Colombian embassy who was also a CIA asset.
Rising career, collapsing judgment
Back in Washington in 1983, Ames was appointed head of the CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence division, giving him access to some of the agency’s most sensitive secrets, even as concerns about his drinking persisted.
His financial pressures grew as he supported his first wife while funding Rosario’s expensive tastes. Those debts ultimately drove him to sell secrets.
“It was about the money,” said FBI agent Leslie G Wiser, who helped investigate the case, speaking to BBC Witness History in 2015. “He never really tried to pretend it was anything else.”
Ames continued spying until his arrest on 21 February 1994, after a lengthy mole hunt within the US intelligence community.
Guilty plea and condemnation
Ames pleaded guilty to espionage and tax evasion, avoiding a public trial. He received life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Rosario Ames admitted knowing about the money and meetings with Soviet handlers and was sentenced to just over five years in prison.
Then CIA director R. James Woolsey described Ames as “a malignant betrayer of his country”.
“The agents he betrayed died because a murdering traitor wanted a bigger house and a Jaguar,” Woolsey said at the time.
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In a jailhouse interview before sentencing, Ames said he acted out of “financial troubles, immediate and continuing”. He expressed shame but downplayed the damage he caused, claiming spy wars had little real impact on national security, a view widely rejected by intelligence experts.
A legacy of mistrust
Ames’s treachery haunted the US intelligence community for years, prompting sweeping reforms in counterintelligence and internal oversight.
His name resurfaced in public debate in 2018 with the publication of The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre, which detailed how Ames tipped off Moscow about British agent Oleg Gordievsky, nearly costing him his life.
Aldrich Ames leaves behind a legacy defined by betrayal, lives lost, and one of the gravest intelligence failures in American history.
