15. The Traitorous Jerk Who Thrived For Decades in the CIA
Aldrich Ames (1941 – ) was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official who rose to high rank within the agency’s Soviet and East European division, which afforded him access to Soviet counterintelligence. He abused that access to sell secrets, and became America’s most infamous modern era turncoat. The son of a CIA analyst, Ames’ connections paved the way for his joining the CIA in 1962. He turned traitor and sold his services to the Soviet KGB as a deep mole within their enemy’s camp, and became one of the USSR’s, and later Russia’s, most effective double agents in the US.
Ames had a track record of heavy drinking, alcohol-related problems that included inebriated run-ins with the police and drunken brawls in public with foreign diplomats. Plus sloppiness that once led him to forget secret documents in an NYC subway car. It did not stop him from rising steadily through the CIA’s ranks. After a stint in Turkey recruiting Soviet spies in the 1960s, he returned to America in the 1970s, before getting posted to Mexico in the early 1980s. There, he met his second wife, a Colombian whom he had recruited.