Notorious CIA spy whose treachery caused the deaths of countless sources has died in federal prison

By Josh Campbell, CNN

(CNN) — One of the most notorious spies in United States history, responsible for the arrest and eventual execution of numerous Soviet and Russian officials secretly working on behalf of the US intelligence community, has died at the age of 84.

Aldrich Ames, a former CIA case officer arrested by the FBI in 1994 and sentenced to life in prison for espionage, died in custody on Monday, according to a spokesperson for the US Bureau of Prisons.

The official said a Maryland medical examiner will determine his cause of death.

Ames joined CIA in 1962 as a low-level document analyst, eventually working his way up through the ranks as a case officer and specializing in targeting the Soviet Union.

In 1985, Ames went to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, and volunteered to spy against the United States, according to his guilty plea agreement. Later that decade, alarm bells started going off within the CIA and FBI over the arrest and execution of numerous double agents feeding secrets to the United States.

“Aldrich Ames put some of those names to death by sharing them with his KGB case officer,” said CNN presidential historian Tim Naftali, in the CNN Original Series program “Secrets & Spies.”

It is estimated that Ames received approximately $2.5 million from Russia and the Soviet Union for his years of spying.

Ames eventually fell under the suspicion of a joint interagency team responsible for investigating “the losses” as they were known among a small group of counterintelligence officials, and by 1993, was the subject of a full FBI investigation utilizing physical and electronic surveillance to track his moves.

“Not only were the CIA and its intelligence sources in the Soviet Union completely compromised, he also was in a compromised position,” said Bianna Golodryga, CNN anchor and senior global affairs analyst.

In the aftermath of Ames’ arrest, congressional investigators slammed the agency for its inability to deal with Ames’ suitability problems, including “drunkenness, disregard for security regulations, and sloppiness towards administrative requirements.”

“The Ames case reveals glaring weaknesses in the CIA’s procedures for dealing with the career assignments of employees who are under suspicion for compromising intelligence operations,” the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wrote in its 1994 report.

After the Ames case, and the later arrest of FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen for similar charges of espionage that resulted in untold deaths of US government human sources, the CIA and FBI moved to strengthen its so-called insider threat programs aimed at safeguarding the nation’s secrets by closely scrutinizing the finances and travel of personnel with access to classified information, and increasing the use of polygraphs to routinely assess employees for continued allegiance and suitability.

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