It began with silence.
One by one, CIA assets deep inside the Soviet Union vanished. Some disappeared without a trace. Others turned up dead. Behind closed doors in Washington, panic quietly took hold. For years, no one could understand why America's closest secrets were unravelling like a spool of thread yanked in the dark.
Thousands of kilometres away, Oleg Gordievsky, a Russian colonel secretly working for Britain's MI6, sat alone in a safehouse, still trying to make sense of how the KGB had nearly caught him. "For nearly nine years I have been guessing," he would later say, "who was the man who betrayed me?"
The answer came on April 28, 1994, when a bespectacled CIA veteran named Aldrich Ames stood in a US courtroom and confessed to being the mole. The man who, for nine years, sold secrets to the Soviets, not for ideology, but for cash, and left a trail of betrayal behind him.
Ames's fall from grace began not with a whisper of discontent against the US, but with a chalk mark on a mailbox. That signal, a dead drop, was another handoff of top-secret intelligence to the KGB.
For years, Ames passed plastic-wrapped CIA documents detailing everything from surveillance tech to names of American assets within the USSR. These actions systematically dismantled nearly every US spy network operating in the Soviet Union.
"I felt a great deal of financial pressure," Ames would later admit. "In retrospect, I was clearly overreacting." But overreaction doesn't begin to cover the scale of his betrayal.
A Career That Should Have Ended Sooner
Ames wasn't a rising star. He bumbled through early assignments, struggled with alcohol like his father (also a CIA man) before him, and was known for poor work habits. Once, he even left a briefcase full of classified documents on a subway. Still, somehow, he kept climbing the ranks.
By 1983, despite a questionable track record, Ames was appointed head of the CIA's Soviet counterintelligence branch - a post that gave him nearly unrestricted access to the Agency's deepest secrets.
That same year, his financial woes deepened. Amid a costly divorce from his first wife and mounting expenses from his second, Rosario, Ames began to drown in debt.
So, in April 1985, with a few drinks for courage, he walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington and offered up names of agents working secretly for the CIA within the USSR for $50,000.
The Price Of Betrayal
Ames didn't stop there. Over the next nine years, he pocketed more than $2.5 million, the highest known sum ever paid to a Soviet spy, and handed over the identities of more than 30 agents and compromised over 100 CIA operations.
"It was about the money," said FBI agent Leslie Wiser, who later led the investigation. "And I don't think he ever really tried to lead anybody to believe it was anything more than that."
The consequences were swift and brutal. In 1985, Soviet agents working with the CIA began to disappear. One by one, they were arrested, tortured, and in many cases, executed. Among them was General Dmitri Polyakov, a high-ranking Soviet army officer and long-time CIA asset.
Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB colonel who had been secretly spying for MI6 from London, narrowly avoided that fate. "I was enthusiastic. I liked the Americans," Gordievsky told the BBC. "I wanted to share my knowledge with them, and now I realise [Ames] was sitting there... which means that everything, all the new answers of my information, he must have passed to the KGB."
Tom Mangold, reporting for Newsnight, described the tragic irony best. "The top KGB defector was debriefed by the top KGB mole," he said.
Cracks In The Armour
For nearly a decade, America's worst intelligence disaster was walking its hallways in plain sight.
While the CIA searched high and low for the mole within, Aldrich Ames bought a Jaguar, paid for his wife's liposuction in cash, and moved into a $540,000 house in Arlington. All on a $60,000 government salary.
His position meant he could meet Russian handlers without raising suspicion. His downfall came not from a brilliant counterintelligence breakthrough, but from old-fashioned scrutiny of his spending habits.
By the early 1990s, the CIA and FBI grew suspicious. A joint task force finally zeroed in on Ames. On February 21, 1994, after a lengthy surveillance operation, Aldrich and Rosario Ames were arrested outside their Arlington, Virginia, home.
Ames cooperated, offering a full confession in exchange for a lighter sentence for Rosario, who served five years. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. A sentence he is currently serving in a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
His case shook the CIA to its core, much like the exposure of Kim Philby rocked British intelligence decades earlier.
"He regrets getting caught. He doesn't regret being a spy," said FBI's Leslie Wiser of Aldrich Ames.
