Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsBig Disappointment
Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2017
The main disappointment was that the book stops about a year before Ames is actually arrested for being a traitor. Why? Because the case was turned over to the FBI to actually prove that Ames was the traitor. The FBI had been given only the thin suspicions of the CIA that Ames was the one who had let the Soviets know which of their own Soviet citizens were working for the CIA. The main suspicion it was Ames was the knowledge that on three separate dates that Ames had a meeting with a Soviet embassy employee - totally in the open under CIA sanctions – and had shortly thereafter deposited cash sums between $9.000 to $5,000 to his bank account. That was the Eureka moment of one of the co-authors, Sandra Grimes. It is never explained why this could not as easily have happened by chance, with no connection to the Soviet meetings. And the sums involved were quite modest.
In any case, all of the data on Ames and his wife, the surveillance catching Ames in the act of giving information to the Soviets at a dead drop and much other information fell to the FBI to have to collect, if indeed Ames was their man. Without this information a case could not have been made that would hold up in court and result in Ames’ conviction. But this book gives us no insight into how the FBI was able to gather this data. The obvious thing to do would have been to have the co-authors of this book reach out to the FBI to have one of their retired agents fill in the details of this part of the investigation. It is symptomatic of the lack of trust and cooperation between these two organizations that this common sense solution was not done, and the entire book suffers because of it.
A second major disappointment was the fact that the material on Ames really only started 100 pages into the book. Until then, the reader is treated to a lot of detail about the careers of these two women in the CIA, none of which was terribly interesting to this reader However, some of those pages were taken up with brief descriptions of the Soviet citizens that the CIA had recruited to work for the U.S. and who were compromised and usually executed by the Soviets as a result of the Ames betrayal. This material was very pertinent to understand the magnitude of what Ames had knowingly done to these brave and principled Soviet citizens, in addition to grievously hurting his own country.
And then there was the tiresome bureaucratic jargon giving details about the ever changing organizational chart and employee titles within the CIA. The proliferation of acronyms throughout the book is mind numbing and terribly annoying. Most could have been left out with not a bit of essential material lost. In fact, its readability would have been greatly improved. And lastly, one is left with the impression that the CIA and FBI were often very wary of each other and lost sight of the higher goal of protecting American security. And this all before 9-11.
