The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

This chapter introduces CIA agent Aldrich Ames, who eventually spied for the Soviets, and describes Gordievsky’s first months in London after being posted to the rezidentura there. The author describes Ames as a mediocre, even failing, agent in Mexico City who felt “underappreciated, underpaid, and undersexed” (123). His father had worked in the CIA in the postwar years, and Ames followed in his footsteps. He was lazy, his work was a little sloppy, and his superiors considered him merely adequate at his job. While posted in Turkey after the Prague Spring, he was ordered one night to put up posters in support of the Czechs to make it seem like a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy from the Turkish people. Instead, he ditched the posters and went to a bar.

In the early 1970s, he trained in the agency’s department devoted to the Soviet bloc, and after being posted for a time in New York City was sent to Mexico City to try to recruit Soviet spies. He drank heavily, had a loveless marriage, and was foundering professionally. Then he met the cultural attaché at the Colombian embassy, a woman 12 years his junior named Rosario. She was from a patrician but poor family and was looking for a wealthy foreigner to marry.