How did Aldrich Ames become the most damaging double agent in the United States?

Aldrich Ames spent nearly a decade selling classified information to the Soviet Union, compromising more than 100 covert operations and leading to the deaths of at least 10 Western intelligence operatives. On April 28, 1994, the double agent was sentenced to life imprisonment. In February of that year, the BBC spoke to one of the spies who was betrayed by Eames, but lived to tell the story.

In 1985, Soviet agents working for the CIA suddenly began to disappear. One by one, these Western intelligence sources were arrested by the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, interrogated, and, often, executed.

Oleg Gordievsky was one of these double agents. As head of the KGB station in London, he had secretly worked for MI6 for years. But one day he found himself in Moscow, drugged, exhausted after five hours of interrogation, and facing the real possibility of death by firing squad. Gordievsky narrowly escaped with his life after MI6 smuggled him out of the Soviet Union in the trunk of a car.

After that, Gordievsky tried to find out who had abandoned him. “For almost nine years I’ve been guessing who the man was, who the source who betrayed me was, and I didn’t know any answer,” he told BBC correspondent Tom Mangold in an interview on Newsnight on 28 February 1994. Two months later, Gordievsky got his answer when veteran CIA officer Aldrich Ames stood in an American courtroom and admitted to threatening “almost all Soviet agents of the CIA and other known American and foreign services.” I”.