Seeking money to pay debts, Ames said he began providing the KGB with the names of CIA spies in April 1985, receiving an initial payment of $50,000.
Known to the KGB by his code name, Kolokol (The Bell), Ames went on to identify virtually all of the CIA’s spies in the Soviet Union, for which he was well rewarded.
“To my enduring surprise, the KGB replied that it had set aside for me $2 million in gratitude for the information,” he said in an eight-page statement he read to the court.
Over the course of nine years, Ames admitted receiving a total of about $2.5 million from the Soviet Union for his betrayal of the US.
The cash fuelled a lavish lifestyle, with Ames splashing out on a new Jaguar car, foreign holidays and a $540,000 house – despite never having a salary of more than $70,000 a year.
Ames’s 31-year career at the CIA began when his father, an analyst at the CIA, helped him land a job there after dropping out of college in 1962.
He married his first wife, fellow CIA agent Nancy Segebarth, in 1969, before being sent to Turkey as a counterintelligence officer to recruit foreign agents.
Three years later, he was brought back to the US, where his problems with alcohol began to emerge and his marriage began to collapse.
Despite several security violations over the years, including leaving a briefcase full of classified information on a subway, Ames was then sent to Mexico City in 1981.
