CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames, who sold US secrets to Soviets, dies in jail at 84

WASHINGTON: Aldrich Ames, the most murderous turncoat in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose betrayal in working for the Soviet Union went undetected for almost a decade, died Monday. He was 84 and had been a federal prisoner, serving life without parole, since 1994.The death was recorded in the federal bureau of prisons inmate database. The son of an alcoholic CIA officer, Ames failed upward through the agency ranks for 17 years until he attained a headquarters post of extraordinary sensitivity.He became the chief of counterintelligence of the CIA’s Soviet division in Sept 1983. He had access to some of the nation’s deepest secrets: in particular, its clandestine liaisons with the Soviets, who worked in secret with US intelligence. As the Cold War was cresting, Ames decided that he would change the course of history by upending a long-running game of nations, the contest of spy versus spy. He saw it as a charade. By his own account, he was fuelled by a toxic cocktail of vodka, arrogance, delusions of grandeur and greed.In April 1985, he took his first gamble. He hand-delivered an envelope addressed to the KGB chief at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. He offered a smattering of CIA secrets, and he requested $50,000 in return. Ames feared that one of the CIA’s Russians might betray him, so he decided to betray them all. He knew he would be paid a fortune.“I panicked,” he said in a 1994 interview with the New York Times, conducted from jail. “Only by suddenly giving them everyone” would he be protected — and he knew in return that he would be paid “as much money as I could ever use, if I chose to do that.”Ames put together hundreds of secret documents in a 6-pound stack — a who’s who of Soviets working for the CIA and an encyclopedia of US intelligence operations behind the Iron Curtain. He stuffed them in his briefcase, walked out of headquarters and delivered them to a contact at the Soviet Embassy. “I was delivering myself along with them,” he said in the interview. The KGB took care of him — he was paid $2.7 million — and it took care of its own turncoats. As many as 10 Soviet and Soviet-bloc spies were arrested, interrogated and executed for treason. The network that had provided the US with political, military, diplomatic and intelligence insights on Moscow was destroyed. Ames also revealed the identities of two dozen other US intelligence officers and foreign agents working for the CIA and exposed some 50 secret operations in Russia, Europe and Latin America, the agency concluded. As the CIA’s Russians disappeared, one by one by one, the agency began to fear that it had a traitor in its midst. But the search for the mole sputtered and ground to a halt.In 1989, a CIA officer reported that Ames, on returning to Washington, was inexplicably wealthy: He had paid $540,000 in cash for a new home and he was driving a new Jaguar. It was not until 1993 that a probe began, spurred in large part by the FBI. The FBI put handcuffs on Ames in 1994. His wife, who went by Rosario, was arrested too — she knew about his treason and spent the proceeds — and received a five-year jail term.