Committing espionage is always a unique and deeply personal calculation, but there are several common factors. Some people spy because they are coerced into a corner and they feel that revealing secrets to a hostile intelligence service is the only choice left to them (commonly known as compromise or blackmail); others spy for egotistical reasons or to get revenge for a perceived wrong; many of the most damaging historical spies have cited ideological reasons as the root cause of their treachery. But for some, betrayal is purely and simply down to financial greed. For Aldrich ‘Rick’ Ames, money was the prime motivator for a betrayal that lasted nearly a decade. He was probably the most destructive Soviet mole in the CIA, crippling agency operations against the hardest intelligence topic through the end of the Cold War and beyond.

Ames was born in May 1941 in River Falls, Wisconsin. Spying was in his blood: his father, a nondescript and part-time academic, spent a three-year tour as a CIA operations officer in Rangoon, Burma in the early 1950s. By all accounts this did not go well, and when he returned to the CIA Ames senior found it difficult to find a Division that would have him, eventually – and somewhat ironically – ending up working with James Angleton (see Chapter 10) in the Counterintelligence Staff. The rest of his CIA career was uneventful and he became more and more dependent on alcohol. Following in his father's footsteps, Ames junior interned in the CIA in the late 1950s whilst at university, and joined the agency full time in 1962.

Aldrich Ames spent just over three decades in the CIA, though he never broke into its senior ranks. The vast majority of his career was spent in the Directorate of Operations with a focus on the Soviet Union. His first and relatively unremarkable posting was to Ankara, Turkey, in the late 1960s. As various publications cite, his annual appraisals were underwhelming and upon return to headquarters he took up a desk job within the Soviet– East European (SE) Division. Although his performance evaluations from this period were competitive with his peers, by this point his marriage was breaking down and he was drinking more and more.