Nightmover.

• Author: Pincus, Walter

If ever there was a clarion call for a good hard look at the practice of espionage in the post-Cold War world, Aldrich H. Ames provides it. In need of money in the mid-eighties, Ames, a 30-year CIA veteran, turned to spying for Moscow, exposing every major American spy to the Soviets. Characterized by colleagues and investigators as lazy and inept, he somehow managed to avoid detection for nine years before his arrest in February 1994, even as he pocketed over $2.7 million.

How could the Soviets have penetrated the CIA so deeply? Why would a veteran agent suddenly turn to the KGB? Moreover, why did it take nine years for the CIA and FBI to recognize the obvious signs that Ames was on the take? Three new books take stabs at the Ames case: Nightmover by David Wise; Killer Spy by Peter Maas; and Betrayal by David Johnston, Neil A. Lewis, and Tim Weiner, the three New York Times reporters who covered Ames. Each book is layered with the intrigue of espionage, but even taken together, the three leave many of the fundamental questions raised by the Ames case unanswered.

The books succeed, however, in one very important area. In the process of tracking Ames over his three decades in the CIA, the authors give a valuable portrait of Agency culture, particularly the practice of recruiting spies. With a few exceptions, CIA operations officers and FBI counterintelligence regarded recruiting Russian spies as their chief mission. Recruiting is clearly one of the foundations of intelligence, and as portrayed in these books, it has a lot to answer for.

Ames first tried his hand at recruiting in Turkey in 1971. Never mind that it was too difficult for the rookie recruiter Ames to turn a seasoned KGB officer, Wise writes: "A young first-tour officer was not expected to do much more than try." If a Soviet couldn't be snared, the ethic held, then recruit someone, anyone. One of Ames's superiors in Turkey ordered him to recruit a Pakistani second secretary as an "access agent." Pakistan, of course, was on our side. What benefit the CIA would reap from a low-level bureaucrat within a friendly government wasn't the kind of question one asked; spies were collected for their own sake.

Ten years later, Ames, who by this time had shown little talent at recruiting, was sent to Mexico. There he set out after no less a person than the chief Soviet counterintelligence official in Mexico, one Igor I. Shurygin. It was around this time that Ames began to show signs that he...