A Central Intelligence Agency employee who ended up working for the Russians during the Cold War has died in prison.
Aldrich Ames was 84 years old.
The Bureau of Prisons said Ames died at a Maryland facility on Jan. 5, The Associated Press reported.
The cause of death was not listed, according to The Washington Post.
Ames was working for the Soviet/Eastern European division at CIA headquarters when he was approached by the KGB. He continued working with the Russians while assigned to Rome and when he returned to Washington, D.C.
As a CIA operative, he was typically disguised as a member of the State Department while he was working undercover for the U.S. spy agency, the Post said.
He said that his missions for the U.S. government allowed him to compartmentalize his thinking while working for the Russians.
“I tend to put some of these things in separate boxes, and compartment feelings and thoughts,” he told the newspaper weeks after his arrest in 1994.
“I felt at least the way I’m selling these guys down the river, I’m exposing myself to the same fate,” he added.
Ames was paid $2.5 million by the Russian government for providing U.S. intelligence to Moscow from 1985 to 1994, including giving the names of 10 Russians and one Eastern European spying for the U.S. or Great Britain.
He told the court during his plea agreement that he gave the KGB the names of “virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me” along with a “huge quantity of information on United States foreign, defense and security policies,” the Post reported.
He also gave Russia information on dozens of operations in Russia, Europe and Latin America, The New York Times reported.
He told the court that when he started working with the KGB, he was “one of the most knowledgeable people in the intelligence community on the Russian intelligence service. And my access to information and my knowledge of the Soviets was such that I could get virtually anything I wanted.”
But it wasn’t that he liked the Russian regime.
“There was this strange transfer of loyalties,” he said. “It wasn’t to the Soviet system, which I believe was a beastly, inhuman, nasty regime.”
Instead, he said he did it because he was disillusioned with the U.S. intelligence and had changed his way of life, which was above what the Post said were the “petty concerns of governments.”
His way of life included a Jaguar and a home that he paid $540,000 in cash.
Ames was paid at least $2.705 million for the secrets he provided, The New York Times reported.
He also said, “For those persons in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere who may have suffered from my actions, I have the deepest sympathy, even empathy. We made similar choices and suffer similar consequences.”
The information he provided led to the executions of those working for the West spying on the Iron Curtain.
Ames pleaded guilty to espionage and tax evasion and did not go to trial, sentenced to life in prison without parole.
He said he had “profound shame and guilt” for the “betrayal of trust, done for the basest of motives,” which he said was money to pay off debts, the AP reported.
Ames’ wife was also caught up in the case, and pleaded guilty to assisting her husband in spying and was sentenced to 63 months behind bars, the AP reported.
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