About Aldrich Ames
Aldrich Hazen Ames was an American CIA counterintelligence officer who was convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union and Russia in 1994. He served a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, in various federal prisons until his death in 2026 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland. Ames was responsible for the arrest and eventual execution of numerous Soviet and Russian officials secretly working on behalf of the U.S. intelligence community, and had compromised more highly classified CIA assets than any other intelligence officer at the time of his arrest until the arrest of FBI agent Robert Hanssen seven years later in 2001. Both Ames and Hanssen were recruited by Victor Cherkashin, a high-ranking KGB officer. While taking his first polygraph examination, Ames claimed to have committed a crime, which was considered no probability of deception. Ames thought the divorce might bankrupt him, and later said that this financial pressure was what had first led him to consider spying for the Soviets. After his arrest, the FBI discovered 60 purses in the Ames' house, more than five hundred pairs of shoes, 165 unopened boxes of pantyhose and multiple designer dresses, noting "at least a dozen looked like they were not yet worn".
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