Word: ameses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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The recent arrest of Aldrich H. Ames has, for the first time in a while, returned to the front pages of our morning dailies the issue of spying, and specifically, spying in the context of the forgotten but not gone Cold War.
Rick Ames is charged with being nothing less than the worst mole in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. He is accused of selling to the Soviets (and later the Russians) top secret information, and along the way, of selling out about ten American spies who were summarily executed...
So is it wrong for us to begrudge Mr. Ames his Swiss bank accounts and Arlington digs? Should we instead pin a medal on his chest and send him on his way? Certainly not.
Peacetime spying useful only as a murky undercurrent, which if more common would throw international affairs into a worse turmoil than if spying didn't exit at all. The keen moral disapprobation we feel for the individual spy is a key rule of the game. And, aside from that, Ames...
No, Ames will soon be off to the basement of the Marion penitentiary, and well it should be. There he will join Jonathan Pollard, and the two of them can ponder their peculiar predicament--suffering a deserved fate, while the countries that put them up to their crimes continue to...