Adams James. Sell Out: Aldrich Ames: The Spy Who Broke the CIA

Lume Books, 2017. — 305 p.The most important recruit to the KGB since Kim Philby. Aldrich Ames was a downwardly mobile CIA officer with a serious inferiority complex, and an even more serious drink problem. But his betrayal would make him a multimillionaire, cause the death of at least ten of America’s best agents, and single-handedly destroy a superpower’s Cold War intelligence operation. On 21 February 1994, Aldrich Ames and his wife Rosario were finally arrested outside their home by the FBI. It was the end of the biggest spy hunt in American history — and the beginning of the biggest scandal ever to hit the CIA. But why was Ames not caught sooner? And who, in the end, was to blame? Sell Out is the first major investigation of the Ames affair.