Aldrich Ames, the most damaging CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) agent in the US histor, passed away at 84.
According to NBC News, the Bureau of Prisons confirmed that the CIA agent who sold secrets of the country to Soviet Union and Russia for nearly a decade died in a Maryland prison on Monday, January 5.
Ames is best known as an ex-CIA agent who spied on the US on behalf of the Soviet Union. Ames, along with his wife, Rosario Ames, was arrested in February 1994 and pleaded guilty without a trial to espionage and tax evasion.
Aldrich was charged with espionage, and his wife with aiding and abetting his activities.
The couple pleaded guilty to their respective charges. Aldrich was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, while Rosario got a little over five years.
Ames admitted to passing on information to Moscow for nearly a decade, including the identities of western agents behind the Iron Curtain, and says he was paid $2.5m by Russia.
He was arrested In a jailhouse interview with the Washington Post the day before he was sentenced, Ames said he was motivated to spy by “financial troubles, immediate and continuing”.
He professed “profound shame and guilt” for “this betrayal of trust, done for the basest motives”, money to pay debts. But he downplayed the damage he caused, telling the court he did not believe he had “noticeably damaged” the United States or “noticeably aided” Moscow.
In 2018, Ames’s name re-entered the public imagination by way of Ben Macintyre’s book The Spy and the Traitor, which detailed the rescue of a KGB colonel working for MI6 named Oleg Gordievsky from Moscow in 1985.
