CIA Turncoat Dies in Prison at 84

Aldrich Ames, the career CIA officer who sold out America's spies to Moscow for cash in one of the worst breaches in the agency's history, has died in federal prison at 84. The Bureau of Prisons says Ames, locked up since 1994 under a life-without-parole sentence, died Monday at a facility in Cumberland, Maryland.

• The New York Times reports that Ames, son of a CIA officer, "failed upward through the agency ranks for 17 years" before landing a highly sensitive job in 1983 as chief of counterintelligence in the Soviet division. From there, he had access to the CIA's most valuable Soviet sources—roughly a dozen deeply placed agents inside the USSR's government and embassies, cultivated over decades.

• In 1985, seeing the Cold War spy game as an empty spectacle and driven, by his own later account, by ego, greed, and heavy drinking, he walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington and offered secrets for $50,000.
• He spent the next nine years secretly working for Moscow, remaining a double agent even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Washington Post reports. He admitted giving the KGB the identities of "virtually all" Soviet agents working for the CIA and allied services, plus large volumes of classified material on US policy. Officials say as many as 10 Soviet and Eastern Bloc agents were arrested, interrogated, and executed, with others jailed or forced to flee. The CIA's flow of reliable intelligence from Moscow collapsed, and the KGB moved to fill the gap with disinformation.

• The KGB paid Ames at least $2.7 million over the years but it was a long time before the CIA took a hard look at him, the Times reports. A CIA officer reported in 1989 that he was "inexplicably wealthy" after his return to Washington from a three-year posting in Rome, per the Times, but the concerns were not passed higher up for at least a year and a formal criminal investigation didn't begin until 1993.
• Though he pleaded guilty to espionage and tax evasion in 1994, Ames consistently tried to minimize the broader impact of his betrayal, calling espionage a "sideshow" in the larger security picture. In interviews, he described a habit of "compartmentalizing" his loyalties and emotions, saying he separated his actions from his oath and personal ties.
• In a jailhouse interview with the Post the day before he was sentenced to life without parole, Ames, then 52, said he was motivated to spy for the Soviets by "financial troubles, immediate and continuing."