Infamous CIA officer turned Soviet spy dies in prison

After more than 30 years since pleading guilty to espionage that reportedly compromised several United States assets during the Cold War, an infamous Central Intelligence Agency officer has died in prison.

Aldrich Ames died on Monday, according to the Bureau of Prisons website.

Ames claimed he needed the money simply to pay debts and relieve ‘financial troubles, immediate and continuing.’

Ames was held in the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, where he was serving a life sentence without parole.

Ames, a career CIA agent, was arrested in 1994 on espionage charges years after he began cooperating with KGB agents in 1985. The information he provided to the Soviets is thought to have directly contributed to the compromising of several CIA and FBI sources, some of whom were executed after their discovery.

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Photo by Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma via Getty Images

Over nearly a decade, Moscow paid him $2.5 million in exchange for betraying state secrets to the Soviets during and after the Cold War. Ames claimed he needed the money simply to pay debts and relieve “financial troubles, immediate and continuing.”

“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 interview archived by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, according to Fox News.

“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, certainly, in the case of KGB and GRU officers who would be tried in a military court, and certainly others, that they were almost all at least potentially liable to capital punishment,” he added. “There’s simply no question about this.”

Ames’ wife, Rosario, was sentenced to 63 months in prison on charges of assisting his espionage.

Ames was 84 years old at the time of his death.

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