Icon by Frederick Forsyth

authenticity and then spring the real sting, which is entirely false and can create havoc among the people he is supposed to be working for.
    Finally, counterintelligence has to ensure that its own side has not been penetrated, is not harboring a traitor at its own breast.
    To accomplish these tasks, counterintelligence has to have total access. It can call up all the files on all the defectors and their debriefings, going back over years. It can examine the careers and recruitment of all current assets working for the agency deep in the heart of opponent territory and exposed to every conceivable danger of betrayal. And counterintelligence can demand the personnel file of every officer on its own side. All in the name of checking loyalty and genuineness.
    Because of rigorous compartmentalization and the need-to-know principle, an intelligence officer acting as controller of one or two operations can betray those operations, but will normally have no idea what his colleagues are working on. Only counterintelligence has access to the lot. That is why Colonel Androsov, had he been asked by the archangel, would have chosen the head of counterintelligence for the Soviet Division. Counterintelligence people have to be the most loyal of the loyal.
    In July 1983, Aldrich Hazen Ames was appointed to head the Soviet Counterintelligence Group of the SE Division. As such he had complete access to its two sub-branches: the USSR Desk handling all Soviet assets working for the United States but posted inside the USSR, and the External Ops Desk handling all assets then posted outside the USSR.
    On April 16, 1985, short of money, he walked into the Soviet Embassy on Washington’s Sixteenth Street, asked to see Colonel Androsov, and volunteered to spy for Russia. For fifty thousand dollars.
    He brought with him some small bona fides. He gave away the names of three Russians who had approached the CIA offering to work for it. Later he would say he thought they were probably double agents, i.e., not genuine. Whatever, those three gentlemen were never heard from again. He also brought an internal CIA personnel list with his own name highlighted to prove he was who he said he was. Then he left, walking for the second time right past the FBI cameras filming the front forecourt. The tapes were never played back.
    Two days later he got his fifty thousand dollars. It was just the start. The most damaging traitor in America’s history, back to and probably including Benedict Arnold, had just started work.
    Later analysts would puzzle over two enigmas. The first was how such a grossly inadequate, underperforming, alcohol-abusing loser could ever have risen through the ranks to such an amazing position of trust. The second was how, when the senior hierarchs knew by that December in their secret hearts that they had a traitor among them somewhere, he could have remained unexposed for a further—and for the CIA catastrophic—eight years.
    The answer to the second has a dozen facets. Incompetence, lethargy, and complacency within the CIA, luck for the traitor, a skillful disinformation campaign by the KGB to protect its mole, more lethargy, squeamishness, and indolence at Langley, red herrings, more luck for the traitor, and, finally, the memory of James Angleton.
    Angleton had once been head of counterintelligence at the agency, rising to become a legend and ending deranged by paranoia. This strange man, without private life or humor, became convinced there was a KGB mole, code-named Sasha, inside Langley. In fanatic pursuit of this nonexistent traitor, he crippled the careers of loyal officer after loyal officer until he finally brought the Operations Directorate to its knees. Those who survived him, risen by 1985 to high office, were desolated at the thought of doing what had to be done—searching with rigor for the real mole.
    As for the first question, the answer can be given in two words: Ken Mulgrew.
    In twenty years with the agency before he