Aldrich Ames spent nearly a decade selling classified information to the Soviet Union, compromising more than 100 covert operations and resulting in the deaths of at least 10 Western agents. On April 28, 1994, the double agent was sentenced to life in prison. In February of the same year, the BBC spoke to one of the spies who was betrayed by Ames but lived to tell the story.
In 1985, Soviet agents working for the CIA suddenly started disappearing. One by one, these Western sources were captured, interrogated, and, very often, executed by the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB.
Oleg Gordievsky was one of those double agents. He served as the KGB’s London bureau chief and worked secretly for Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, MI6, for many years. But one day he was in Moscow, drugged, exhausted after five hours of interrogation, and facing the very real possibility of death by firing squad. Gordievsky narrowly escaped death after being smuggled out of the Soviet Union in the boot of a car by MI6.
Gordievsky then tried to find out who had let him go. Gordievsky told the BBC’s Tom Mangold in an interview with Newsnight on February 28, 1994, “For nearly nine years I’ve been speculating about who betrayed me, who the sources were who betrayed me, and I never had any answers.” Two months later, Gordievsky would get his answer when veteran CIA officer Aldrich Ames stood in a U.S. courtroom and confessed to having “harmed virtually all Soviet personnel in the CIA and other known services in the United States and abroad.” To me.”
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
