Aldrich Ames spent nearly a decade selling secret information to the Soviet Union, compromising more than 100 clandestine operations, and leading to the deaths of at least 10 Western intelligence assets. On 28 April 1994, the double agent was jailed for life. In February of that year, the BBC spoke to one of the spies who was betrayed by Ames, but who lived to tell the tale.
In 1985, Soviet agents working for the CIA suddenly began to disappear. One by one, these Western intelligence sources were picked up by the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, interrogated and, very often, executed.
Oleg Gordievsky was one of those double agents. As the KGB’s station chief in London, he had been secretly working for the UK’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, for years. But one day he found himself in Moscow, drugged, exhausted after five hours of questioning, and facing the very real possibility of death by firing squad. Gordievsky narrowly escaped with his life after MI6 smuggled him out of the Soviet Union in the boot of a car.
Afterwards, Gordievsky tried to work out who had given him up. “For nearly nine years I have been guessing who was the man, who was the source who betrayed me, and I didn’t know any answer,” he told the BBC’s Tom Mangold in an interview with Newsnight on 28 February 1994. Two months later, Gordievsky would get his answer when veteran CIA officer Aldrich Ames stood up in a US courtroom, and confessed to compromising “virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me”.
