Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames, who infamously spied for the Soviet Union, has died behind bars at age 84, a Bureau of Prisons spokesperson said.
The Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, was holding the former CIA officer on a sentence of life without parole at the time of his death Monday, CBS News reported. The Federal Bureau of Prisons lists his date of death as Jan. 5.
Authorities arrested Ames, a 31-year CIA veteran, in February 1994 in Arlington, Virginia, on charges connected to espionage activities that began nearly a decade prior, according to a 1994 Senate Intelligence Committee report. After marrying his first wife in 1969, their relationship broke down and he went alone to work in Mexico City from 1981 to 1983. It was there that he met his second wife, Rosario, a Colombian embassy cultural attaché. Another CIA officer recruited her as a paid source in 1982.
Ames’ divorce from his first wife ended in 1985 and produced financial pressures, which mounted due to his and Rosario’s relationship, according to the report. (RELATED: National Guardsman Schemed To Help Russia Spy On US Military, DOJ Says)
Aldrich Ames, CIA turncoat who sold US secrets to Soviets, dead at 84 https://t.co/yK8LQes5m2 pic.twitter.com/MNAOWOylqc
— New York Post (@nypost) January 7, 2026
In 1985, Ames provided the Soviet Union a list of suspected KGB officers who were discreetly working with American officials in exchange for $50,000. He went on to also give the KGB a list of CIA assets in return for over $2 million, leaks that were a “crippling blow” for operations by the agency, CBS News reported.
Ames continued his spy work during his time in Rome and while overseeing operations in Western Europe and Czechoslovakia, according to the outlet. However, the CIA and FBI closed in on Ames as the source of their information leak and surveilled him for months beginning in 1993.
Ames was previously at the center of security breaches in his career. In 1976, he left a briefcase aboard a train that could have compromised a Soviet asset he was meeting with. Despite this, he ended up helming the Soviet branch of the counterintelligence division.
Ames and his wife, who was also charged as his accomplice, plead guilty to charges connected to espionage in April 1994. Rosario received a 5-year prison sentence.
In a July 1994 interview with The New York Times, Ames admitted that financial gain was the driving factor behind his espionage work with the Soviet Union. He went on to claim that he “[knew] what’s best for foreign policy and national security,” adding that the Soviet Union was not as “damaging” as the United States claimed.
He is suspected to have compromised over 100 CIA intelligence operations, CBS News reported.