Rise of the Bourgeois Spy

The notion of "the rules of war" has always vexed me. At a time when people are doing their concerted best to shed enemy blood, to exterminate life, how can an accord signed long ago by some diplomats in Switzerland hold any weight?

The intriguing world of espionage is fraught with a similar moral problematic. A successful spy is necessarily unscrupulous: he must lie and cheat, seduce and steal--in short, flout every moral convention known to man--if he is to be of service to his country. Yet, at the same time, society reserves some of its sharpest moral condemnation for the spy who turns against his country. The lexicon of spying is at once pathologically amoral and sanctimoniously ethical.

The recent arrest of Aldrich H. Ames has, for the first time in a while, returned to the front pages of our morning dailies the issue of spying, and specifically, spying in the context of the forgotten but not gone Cold War.

Rick Ames is charged with being nothing less than the worst mole in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. He is accused of selling to the Soviets (and later the Russians) top secret information, and along the way, of selling out about ten American spies who were summarily executed by Moscow.

How did this not-so-bright, not-so-talented technocrat get away with the worst act of treason in post-World War II America?

The story begins with James Jesus Angleton, the director of the CIA for about twenty years before he was forced out of his post in 1975.

So convinced was Angleton that there was a mole in the inner sanctum of the Agency that he effectively halted all espionage efforts in Russia, fearing that whatever information could be gleaned would find its way back to Moscow via the mole.

Paralyzed by its paranoia, the CIA was in need of a radical new teaching, a new founding, which came in the form of William Casey. Beginning in the early eighties, the Agency once again returned to its de facto charter--spying on the enemy, the Soviet enemy.

But with the dawn of new era in the CIA and with the self-conscious effort to leave the pathologies of Angleton behind, the CIA got lax with its own personnel.

So lax, indeed, that when Rick Ames purchased a $540,000 suburban home--with cash--on a $70,000 a year salary, no heads turned in Langley, Virginia. If it is true that the CIA operates satellites which are able to read a license plate number from deepest darkest space it would seem they could do a better job in keeping an eye on their own personnel.

But the question of "how" in this is instance is best left to the House Select Committee on Intelligence who will carry out (in the words of Rep. Dan Glickman, its chair) "an extensive and exhaustive review" of the matter.

Far more interesting is the issue of "why." What makes a career United States civil servant, himself the son of a CIA employee, risk the kind of infamy--no to mention the severe punishment--that inevitably awaits a traitor?

A trend has emerged in the way this crime is being construed by the print media. Ames is being painted as the post-ideological spy. No one has spoken of Ames' predilections for a Communist regime, or even of a pathological desire to sell out his own country as such. All attempts to explain (away) his act of treason are rooted in social science, either in economics or psychology.

To start with the latter line of reasoning, a sort of journalistic (and therefore crude) Freudianism, suggest that Ames was never able to fill his father's considerable shoes at the agency, leaving him unfulfilled and disgruntled and in need, therefore, of some dramatic adventure. Carried out to its extreme, this logic would probably go on to suggest that Ames not only had a desire to spy but also a need to get caught, thus the poor planning and sloppy execution on his part.

The economic conception of this whole affair calls attention to Ames' posh home and fancy car, and his wife's predilection for extravagant binges at Bloomingdale's.

It has been suggested that the ordinarily stingy Soviet government paid Ames up to $2.7 million over the approximately ten years he worked for them. Perhaps the money the Russians had to offer was simply irresistible to the greedy and increasingly decadent mid-level bureaucrat.

Whether psychology or economics, one thing is clear. Ames represents a new kind of spy, not the type that James Bond movies of John Le Carre novels are made of. Neither is he a Kim Philby or a Jonathan Jay Pollard--no complex web of ideological motivations bore on his act of treason.

Ames might never have given serious thought to anything but his own pocketbook or his own neuroses.

As Aldrich Ames spied against his own, he ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And as a society that is rightfully pessimistic about its own collective health, we ought to be shocked and dismayed by yet another sign of our state of "fallenness"--the rise of the bourgeois spy.