Aldrich Ames, a longtime Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer who betrayed U.S. intelligence by spying for the Soviet Union and later Russia, died at the age of 84.

The Bureau of Prisons website shows that Ames died on Monday. 

He was being held at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, where he was serving out a life sentence.

The FBI said it arrested Ames, a 31-year veteran of the CIA, in 1994 on espionage charges, after he began passing classified information to the KGB in 1985, compromising numerous CIA and FBI human sources, some of whom were later executed.

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The agency said Ames, a Russian-speaking CIA officer who specialized in Russian intelligence services, secretly provided classified materials to the KGB using "dead drops," which are concealed locations where documents were left to be retrieved later by Soviet intelligence officers operating out of the USSR Embassy in Washington.

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Ames ultimately pleaded guilty to espionage charges in 1994 and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, in one of the most damaging spy cases in U.S. history.

"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.

"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."

Wes Street, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said on X in 2022 that Ames volunteered to work for the KGB and compromised over 100 Soviet and East European cases and multiple U.S. assets.

"Ames received payments from the KGB that totaled $2.5 million, making him one of the highest paid American spies," Street wrote. "The KGB kept another $2.1 million earmarked for him in a Moscow bank."

The felony-convicted husband of progressive "squad" lawmaker Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., slapped a phone out of a reporter's hands Monday inside a city hall building after they attempted to approach the congresswoman to ask her a question about alleged childcare fraud in Minnesota. 

"Congresswoman Pressley, do you support –" the interviewer could be heard asking as he approached Pressley with his phone camera on record before Conan Harris, Pressley's husband who spent 10 years in prison on felony drug trafficking charges, smacked the phone out of the questioner's hand.  

"Sir, you cannot take my phone out of my hand," the questioner could be heard saying, before the phone was picked back up and returned to focus. Harris spent 10 years in prison on a drug trafficking charge before marrying Pressley, who said she draws from his experience of reintegrating into regular society after leaving prison to help inform how she advocates for incarcerated, or previously incarcerated, individuals.

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The incident took place Monday at Chelsea City Hall located in Chelsea, Massachusetts.  

Meanwhile, the cameraman tried to focus the picture on Harris after his phone was knocked out of his hand, but Harris was seen walking into what appeared to be a bathroom, or some type of room off the hallway they were located in, once he was able to re-focus the camera.

Instead, the interviewer went back to Pressley and attempted a second time to get his question in. 

"Congresswoman Pressley, do you support President Trump investigating Somali childcare fraud in Minnesota?" he asked as the Massachusetts Democrat walked away, guarded by her entourage of staffers. "Congresswoman Pressley?"

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The lawmaker was being pressed on the issue on the same day the Trump administration announced it would be freezing $10 billion in federal funds going to childcare across five blue states, which follows reports of social services fraud involving the Somali community in Minnesota. 

The states impacted will be California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York.

An official from the Office of Management and Budget reportedly told Axios that the hold is due to both fraud and the provision of funds to undocumented immigrants.

Pressley did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. 

"The fraud in California, New York and Illinois is far greater than in Minnesota," Donald Trump's former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head, Elon Musk, said this week. "My guess for how much fraud is happening nationwide is roughly 10% of the Federal budget, so about $700 billion per year."