Infamous CIA officer turned Soviet spy dies in prison
Photo by Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma via Getty Images
Over nearly a decade, Moscow paid him $2.5 million in exchange for betraying state secrets to the Soviets during and after the Cold War. Ames claimed he needed the money simply to pay debts and relieve “financial troubles, immediate and continuing.”
“Well, the reasons that I did what I did in April of 1985 were personal, banal, and amounted really to kind of greed and folly. As simple as that,” Ames said in an interview archived by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, according to Fox News.
“I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution, and capital punishment, certainly, in the case of KGB and GRU officers who would be tried in a military court, and certainly others, that they were almost all at least potentially liable to capital punishment,” he added. “There’s simply no question about this.”
Ames’ wife, Rosario, was sentenced to 63 months in prison on charges of assisting his espionage.
Ames was 84 years old at the time of his death.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.