18. The Mole
CIA officer Aldrich Ames (1941 – ) rose to high rank within the agency’s Soviet and East European division, which afforded him access to Soviet counterintelligence. He turned traitor and sold his services to the KGB as a deep mole, and became one of the Soviet Union’s, and later Russia’s, most effective double agents in the US.
The son of a CIA analyst, Ames’ family connection paved the way for his joining the CIA in 1962. Notwithstanding heavy drinking, alcohol-related problems that included drunken run-ins with cops and drunken brawls in public with foreign diplomats, as well as sloppiness that once led him to forget secret documents in an NYC subway car, he rose steadily through the CIA’s ranks. After a stint in Turkey recruiting Soviet spies in the 1960s, he returned to the US in the 1970s, before getting posted to Mexico in the early 1980s.