🕯 The CIA’s greatest Soviet “mole” died in a Terre Haute prison cell just before Christmas.
Yes — this is about Aldrich Ames.
The highest-paid spy in history, who received nearly $5 million from the KGB, died at 84 after simply clutching his chest while getting up from his bunk.
Perpetually rumpled, clumsy, an alcoholic with coffee stains on his reports, Ames was long regarded inside the CIA as a harmless loser — which became his perfect camouflage. Langley was steeped in snobbery, and no one believed that “hungover Aldrich” was capable of playing a sophisticated game.
While colleagues mocked his appearance, Ames was selling the entire U.S. agent network in the USSR — wholesale.
Yes, all of them: every Soviet citizen working for the CIA.
The result: 10 death sentences, imprisoned “enemies of the state,” and dozens of channels through which Moscow fed disinformation to Reagan and Bush.
Ironically, Ames was pushed into espionage by his wife Maria del Rosario, whom he had recruited in Colombia. Recruited — and then slept with her, violating CIA rules. After a failed first marriage, the curly-haired Colombian with a nymphomaniac temperament became both his happiness and his addiction. To fund her shopping sprees, $5,000 phone bills to Colombia, and a cash-paid mansion, Ames spied nonstop — like on an assembly line.
When counterintelligence finally questioned his sudden wealth and red Jaguar, he calmly cited his wife’s “family inheritance.” The CIA accepted this at face value for years, never bothering to verify the empty bank accounts of his mother-in-law in Colombia.
Ames passed the polygraph twice, following KGB psychologists’ advice: “Relax and befriend the examiner.”
When asked, “Are you recruited by the KGB?” he answered “No” — with a pulse of 68 beats per minute.
For years, the KGB funneled disinformation through him — data that Presidents Reagan and Bush took at face value when planning military budgets. Later, investigators found a slip of paper among his belongings with ten drawn bullets — one for each CIA agent executed in the USSR.
He was ultimately undone by sheer laziness: tossing torn KGB payment reports into the trash, which the FBI painstakingly reconstructed. A plea deal followed. Full disclosure of KGB networks. Life imprisonment. Daily omelets and burgers.
Ames deeply regretted one thing: the absence of whiskey — or at least beer. In his early years behind bars, he filed petitions begging to drink. Eventually, the addiction faded.
Until his final days, Ames continued commenting on world politics in letters from Terre Haute.
In short: the United States is heading toward war with China — not a trade war, but a real one.
And, in his view, the U.S. might lose it.
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