Aldrich Ames, 84, was serving a life sentence without parole for espionage<\/p>\n
Former CIA officer Aldrich Ames, whose espionage for the Soviet Union and later Russia had far-reaching consequences for US intelligence, has died aged 84 while serving a life sentence in an American jail.
\nAccording to Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) records, Ames passed away on January 5.
\nAmes was Russia\u2019s \u201cmost valuable agent\u201d in the late 20th century, whose actions resulted in significant operational successes for the Soviet and Russian state security, journalist and secret services historian Nikolay Dolgopolov wrote in a piece published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta on Wednesday.
\nAmes was recruited by the Soviet Union in 1985 after he voluntarily approached the Soviet embassy in Washington. At the time, he held the critical position of head of the Soviet branch within the CIA\u2019s Counterintelligence Division. He is credited with exposing between 12 and 25 CIA assets operating within the USSR and Russia, leading to arrests and executions of some of them.
\nThe motives behind his betrayal are contested. While Western narratives have long portrayed Ames as financially motivated \u2013 the lavish lifestyle he and his new wife led ultimately drew FBI scrutiny \u2013 Russian sources present a different view.
\nAccording to former Soviet diplomat Sergey Divilkovsky, who knew Ames personally, the spy\u2019s decision was rooted in deep-seated disillusionment with the anti-Soviet policies of President Ronald Reagan\u2019s administration. Divilkovsky, in a 2001 interview, characterized Ames as a \u201chighly moral agent\u201d and an intellectual who had grown to hate the CIA.<\/p>\n
Read more<\/p>\n
Notorious: The story of the biggest CIA failure in history and the man behind it<\/p>\n
The Soviet and later Russian intelligence services took extensive measures to protect and shield Ames, diverting suspicion away from him. After he was eventually arrested and pleaded guilty to espionage in 1994, the then director of Russia\u2019s Foreign Intelligence Service, Evgeny Primakov, expressed hope for a potential future prisoner exchange.
\nAmes\u2019 case exposed profound failures within the CIA\u2019s internal security, sparking widespread reforms in US counterintelligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Aldrich Ames, 84, was serving a life sentence without parole for espionage Former CIA officer Aldrich Ames, whose espionage for the Soviet Union and later Russia had far-reaching consequences for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25681,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-environment","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}