Aldrich Ames, the former CIA counterintelligence officer whose treason helped Moscow dismantle U.S. spy networks and led to the deaths of American and allied assets, died Monday in federal custody, U.S. authorities confirmed to the Associated Press. Other outlets also reported the news on Tuesday.
The Bureau of Prisons said Ames was 84 and died while serving a life sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland.
Ames' death closes the final chapter on one of the most devastating betrayals in modern American intelligence history, a case that still stings inside Langley three decades later.
Federal prosecutors said Ames sold classified information to the Soviet Union and later Russia, handing over secrets that exposed double agents and compromised sensitive operations across the Cold War's closing years.
U.S. intelligence officials have long said Ames' disclosures resulted in the execution or imprisonment of at least a dozen assets, wiping out years of painstaking work and sending a chilling message to anyone who might consider cooperating with the United States.
The CIA has said Ames spent 31 years with the agency and rose into a position of deep trust, including leadership duties related to Soviet counterintelligence.
Officials have said the betrayal was especially damaging because Ames wasn't a low-level employee stealing stray documents, but a senior counterintelligence specialist whose job was to detect exactly the kind of penetration he ultimately became.
Prosecutors said Ames began spying for Moscow in 1985 and continued for years, even after the Soviet Union collapsed, collecting more than $2.5 million in cash and payments.
Authorities said Ames transmitted names of U.S. and British sources inside the Soviet bloc, information that allowed the KGB and later Russian services to rapidly identify, arrest, and eliminate those cooperating with the West.
The scale of the losses shocked U.S. intelligence veterans, and former officials have described the period as one of the darkest internal crises the CIA faced since the agency's founding.
Investigators said Ames and his wife, Rosario, attracted attention not through a confession or intercepted message, but through money, because their lifestyle suddenly exploded far beyond what a government salary could support.
Court records and prosecutors said the couple kept cash in Swiss bank accounts, bought expensive cars, and ran up major credit card bills, including roughly $50,000 a year, raising the kind of red flags that should have been caught earlier.
CIA critics in Congress said at the time that the Ames case exposed serious weaknesses in internal security and financial monitoring, and they warned that bureaucratic caution and institutional denial delayed action.
Federal authorities said the investigation eventually narrowed to Ames after analysts traced the pattern of compromised operations and the stream of unexplained cash that followed him.
The government has said Ames was arrested in February 1994, ending nearly a decade of espionage that helped Russian intelligence score an extraordinary victory over the U.S.
In court, Ames pleaded guilty to espionage and tax evasion, and federal judges sentenced him to life in prison without parole, a punishment many Americans viewed as the minimum for the damage he caused.
Prosecutors said Rosario Ames was convicted for her role in the conspiracy, and public reporting later noted she served substantially less time than her husband before being released.
Former intelligence officials have said the Ames case permanently changed how the CIA handles internal investigations, financial reviews, and access to highly sensitive information.
Even so, many veterans have argued the case remains a cautionary tale about what happens when agencies tasked with defending the country fail to notice obvious warning signs inside their own walls.
Ames, they said, didn't just betray classified documents, but betrayed the courageous men and women who risked their lives to pass information to the U.S. and believed Washington would protect them.
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