Word: ameses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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So lax, indeed, that when Rick Ames purchased a $540,000 suburban home--with cash--on a $70,000 a year salary, no heads turned in Langley, Virginia. If it is true that the CIA operates satellites which are able to read a license plate number from deepest darkest space...
A trend has emerged in the way this crime is being construed by the print media. Ames is being painted as the post-ideological spy. No one has spoken of Ames' predilections for a Communist regime, or even of a pathological desire to sell out his own country as such...
To start with the latter line of reasoning, a sort of journalistic (and therefore crude) Freudianism, suggest that Ames was never able to fill his father's considerable shoes at the agency, leaving him unfulfilled and disgruntled and in need, therefore, of some dramatic adventure. Carried out to its extreme...
The economic conception of this whole affair calls attention to Ames' posh home and fancy car, and his wife's predilection for extravagant binges at Bloomingdale's.
It has been suggested that the ordinarily stingy Soviet government paid Ames up to $2.7 million over the approximately ten years he worked for them. Perhaps the money the Russians had to offer was simply irresistible to the greedy and increasingly decadent mid-level bureaucrat.