Aldrich Ames, most damaging CIA traitor in agency history, dies at 84 [View all]

Source: Washington Post

January 6, 2026 at 6:43 p.m. EST


Aldrich H. Ames, the CIA officer whose spying for Moscow was the most damaging breach in the agency’s history, reportedly causing the deaths of at least 10 recruited CIA or allied intelligence agents, died Jan. 5 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland. He was 84. His death was recorded in the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ inmate database, which did not say how he died, and confirmed by a spokesman for the agency.

“Financial troubles, immediate and continuing,” Mr. Ames said matter-of-factly, were what led him to spy for the Soviet Union and to remain a double agent for nine years, until the moment of his arrest in February 1994. He had continued to spy for Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991. But money, he said, was not the only reason he could justify to himself what became the Central Intelligence Agency’s worst security loss in its then 47-year history.

When Mr. Ames was interviewed by The Washington Post at the jail in Alexandria, Virginia, nine weeks after his arrest, he calmly attributed his willingness to undertake what prosecutors described as “a crime that caused people to die” to a mentality shaped long before he began his work for the Soviets.

He had been in the spy and counterspy business for 31 years, usually disguised as a State Department official while working undercover as a CIA operative. That dual existence had caused him to compartmentalize his thinking, said Mr. Ames, who would plead guilty in court the next day.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2026/01/06/aldrich-ames-dead-cia-traitor/