The Most Damaging Mole the CIA Ever Hired

On the afternoon of April 16, 1985, a forty-three-year-old man in a grey suit walked into the Soviet Embassy on Sixteenth Street in Washington. He was carrying an envelope. Inside was a single sheet of paper. The sheet listed two Soviet intelligence officers operating in the United States — both of them already secretly working for the Central Intelligence Agency. The man was Aldrich Hazen Ames. He was the chief of the Soviet branch within the CIA's counter-intelligence division. He was, on paper, the man tasked with hunting Soviet spies inside the CIA itself. By the end of that summer, every Soviet citizen reporting to the CIA from inside the USSR had been compromised. At least ten of them were executed. In this episode of The Secret Record, we read the actual declassified documents: the 1994 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, the CIA Inspector General investigation, and Ames's own FBI affidavit. These are the real words. The real documents. #AldrichAmes #ColdWar #Declassified #CIAMole #SovietEspionage