Volume 42, Number 13 · August 10, 1995

No Laughing Matter

By Thomas Powers
Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million
by David Wise

HarperCollins, 356 pp., $25.00

Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy
by Tim Weiner, by David Johnston, by Neil A. Lewis

Random House, 308 pp., $25.00

Killer Spy: The Inside Story of the FBI's Pursuit and Capture of Aldrich Ames, America's Deadliest Spy
by Peter Maas

Warner, 243 pp., $21.95

Sellout: Aldrich Ames and the Corruption of the CIA
by James Adams

Viking, 322 pp., $23.95

The tale of Aldrich Ames, the CIA intelligence officer now serving a life sentence in federal prison for selling secrets to the Russians between 1985 and his arrest in February 1994, has been examined in four new books crammed with true names and organizational detail—which would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. From these varying accounts of Ames's amazing success in eluding discovery by Agency counterintelligence sleuths known as 'mole hunters' we may abstract eight useful axioms for understanding covert intelligence activities during the cold war.



Review, 3936 words

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