Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames

Rating:
Summary: Why Did Ames Betray America?
Review: I wrote this book because I wanted to understand how a trainedCIA officer could betray his country. I also was suspicious about thegovernment's claims that Aldrich Ames was a lackluster, alcoholic drone. I discovered -- after I slipped into a local jail and spent nearly three weeks interviewing him before the FBI learned what I was doing and booted me out-- that Ames was witty, personable, and highly intelligent. And that made his lack of remorse even more frightening. What makes my book unique is that I let Ames speak for himself and it is his revelations, along with his rationalizations and twisted logic that reveal his hollowness. The thing that amazed me the most while writing this book was how similar Ames was to John Walker Jr., another notorious spy and book subject of mine. Despite their differences in education and social class, both ultimately cared only about themselves and satisfying their immediate needs -- that is why betrayal came so easily to them. In the end, they were only loyal to themselves. END

Rating:
Summary: Always Getting Caught
Review: It would be a big mistake for me to say the wrong things about this book, as I have also suffered from a feeling that I know the truth about a few things, but that I could be locked up for saying anything. It was a bit crazy for Ames to see that the KGB would be willing to pay him for telling them the truth about what he knew, given the difficulties that would be involved in keeping a truthful relationship of that nature a secret. But as Nietzsche has observed, even the hollowest nut wants to be cracked. Spying has become a big business in our age of geopolitical dominance, and Ames was in a position to see what the most valuable secrets are. It is too late for me to negotiate with him for the contents of the sawdust file, a review of the treatment of a KGB official who wanted to provide information to the CIA which it didn't want so much that it rigged his lie detector tests so the results would show that he was lying even when he was telling the truth. I am inclined to believe that Ames felt that he was confronting something far more evil than his own acts when he read the case of Yuri Nosenko. In the realm of the greatest secrets, this case is mentioned on page 74 of Veil by Bob Woodward for being "one of the great CIA crimes" in the eyes of Stansfield Turner. William J. Casey "thought it weird that Turner would dwell on" the things covered by the report on the 1,277 days that Nosenko was kept in a cell "as part of some smarmy chess game played by" the agency which defines what covert intelligence really means for the United States. If you read the account of this incident by Aldrich Ames, I hope that you will feel the urge to liberate the knowledge which it contains.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Book About a Despicable Traitor
Review: It's a compulsively readable book about a man whose gravestone inscription should read "My country for a rolex."

Rating:
Summary: The insides of Spy vs Spy
Review: The resourceful author was able to extract so much sensitive information from CIA and KGB that it is difficult to imagine how this information would not jeopardize the life of the spies still at large. I am neither an American nor Russian so I am not very familiar with the rivalry between the CIA and KGB. This book gave me a lot of insight in this aspect. The writing is compact and tightly knitted. A 5 stars book deservingly.

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing
Review: Very well-written book. Even more interesting if you are interested in the American intelligence community and how things could go so wrong. Ames was the quintensential bumbling "Maxwell Smart", and it is absolutely incredible that he went unnoticed for so long. A real page turner, even if you know nothing of the CIA and could care less. Highly recommended.