Sellout: Aldrich Ames and the Corruption of the CIA

Rating:
Summary: The best description of a mole I have ever read
Review: This is the best and most complete description of the life cycle of a mole I have ever read. It also gives supplementary information on other moles and incompetents in the CIA as it goes along. There is one problem in the book. It assumes that the CIA has a monopoly on people with common human nature imperfections. I have seen similar problems in the military, academia, and industry. The reader is probably familiar with the recent Catholic child molesting scandal which is another example. As a result of this, the author advocates corrective action which involves the either-or logical fallacy and "throwing out the infant with th bath water" type actions.

Rating:
Summary: The best description of a mole I have ever read
Review: This is the best and most complete description of the life cycle of a mole I have ever read. It also gives supplementary information on other moles and incompetents in the CIA as it goes along. There is one problem in the book. It assumes that the CIA has a monopoly on people with common human nature imperfections. I have seen similar problems in the military, academia, and industry. The reader is probably familiar with the recent Catholic child molesting scandal which is another example. As a result of this, the author advocates corrective action which involves the either-or logical fallacy and "throwing out the infant with th bath water" type actions.

Rating:
Summary: Selling out and The Year of the Rat
Review: Well written, and stunning in its detail of the incompetence, unbelievable bungling, and the persistent failure to follow up on what was obvious about Ames to all but the blind--this,within the bowels of the CIA at the highest levels. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Not even Ames's rampant drinking, lavish lifestyle, and poor performance could for years unmask or launch a thorough investigation, something in any other organization would certainly take place. And then, to have the same person assigned to the CIA's Counter Intelligence Center with access to highly classified material and at the same time was "considered a dumping ground for CIA underachievers" has to be the apex of irony on a scale incapable of measurement.

"The directorate of [CIA] operations regarded the Counter Intelligence Center as a place that poor performers could be sent because they could not do much harm," said panel chairman Jeffrey H. Smith, a former Senate Intelligence Committee staff member. "It was like a bank concluding that because one of its officers had performed poorly, he should be put in charge of the vault." (pp. 248-49) Indeed.

For the many who did their jobs, this must have been a crushing revelation, none more so than for Jeannie Brookner, a successful case officer who was forced to bring a sexual discrimination lawsuit against the Agency, in which the court papers revealed "a male-chauvinist nightmare of drunkeness, drug-taking, and wife-beating, in which the mentally unsound [Ames might well qualify, in certain respects] serve alongside the corrupt to produce a parody of the intelligence community that is far more bizarre than anything a novelist might imagine. It is difficult to believe that in this apparently lunatic world the CIA could ever spy successfully against anybody." (p. 250)

A companion book would to have to be "The Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised American Security for Chinese Money."

While Rick Ames smugly and gloatingly languishes in jail, he must wonder at times why he hasn't Bill as a cellmate because, as both books reveal, "Ah shucks, we did it for the money."