Aldrich Ames was the most senior CIA officer ever to spy for Russia. He died on January 5th 2026, aged 84.
Ames's father was a history professor who worked for the CIA. As a teenager Ames did odd jobs at the agency's Langley headquarters during summer holidays; the CIA later paid his way through college. He joined the agency full-time in 1962. Though his reports were generally good, he proved a poor field operative, recruiting almost no one during postings to Ankara and Mexico City.
From 1985 to 1994 Ames passed intelligence to the KGB and its successor, the biggest-ever transfer of secrets from the CIA to Soviet intelligence. It began when he slipped an envelope containing a few names and a request for $50,000 to a duty officer at the Soviet embassy in Washington. His initial contact there was Sergey Chuvakhin. What started as a handful of names in an envelope escalated to deliveries of five to seven pounds of classified message traffic in plastic shopping bags.
His betrayals resulted in the executions of at least ten Russian sources working for the Americans and the disruption of almost all the CIA's secret Soviet operations. Among those he compromised were Major General Dmitri Polyakov, who had provided military intelligence to the CIA for a quarter of a century, and Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB rezident in London and an MI6 asset, who survived only because he escaped from Moscow in the boot of a car.
The KGB paid Ames $3,000 or more a month and put $2m aside for him. He spent lavishly: a $540,000 house in Arlington, two Jaguars, capped teeth and tailor-made suits. His Colombian wife Rosario had expensive tastes, accumulating more than 500 pairs of shoes and running up phone bills of $5,000 a month calling her family in Colombia.
Ames sailed through polygraph tests, including one in 1986 when he was specifically questioned about working for other people. He was frequently careless — leaving his safe open, forgetting his briefcase on the New York subway — but was never officially reprimanded. He was a heavy drinker, with a catalogue of alcoholic mishaps. For years all attempts to investigate him foundered. He was eventually arrested by the FBI and sentenced to life without parole.
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