In 1988, somewhere amongst the Soviet Union's many prisons and penal colonies, was a prison cell, one among countless others. If typical, it was grey, nondescript, and shabby, built of weathered and rotting concrete, much like the Soviet Union itself. Its silence was probably marred only by the scudder of rats, the throbbing clang of an occasional metal door being closed, and perhaps the far off moaning or screaming of another prisoner. The smell was probably abhorrent. The grey miasma of wet clammy concrete, with probably just a hint of urine, body odor, feces, mold...and perhaps the unsettling metallic tang of dried blood.
Biding his time in this bleak little corner of perdition was Major General Dmitri Polyakov. Polyakov, a former KGB officer, had been recalled from overseas service in 1980. In 1986, he was arrested, charged with treason, and imprisoned.
He was spectacularly guilty. He was probably the most important double agent the CIA had ever recruited, eclipsing even Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, whose information regarding Soviet missile dispositions had helped to bring the Cuban Missile Crisis to a successful conclusion. He was regarded as the 'crown jewel' of US assets in the Kremlin; his code name, Tophat, was suggestive of his preeminence. He was, kind of remarkably for a spy, a pretty good guy in most respects. He wasn't in it for the money. He claimed he was not doing this for America, he was doing it for Russia. America was so naïve it was surely going to lose the cold war. And the Soviet Union, prison-house of nations, was not a country it was good to imagine triumphant. Polyakov, being braver and cooler than most, had opted to put his finger on the scale of world events, in the hope that he could hasten a change in the country that he loved. He even refused extraction, hoping to provide a bit more useful intelligence to his handlers. This kind of bravery is pretty rare in Polyakov's line of work.
By the time we join Polyakov in his little corner of Siberian paradise, he had probably been beaten and tortured between 50 and 100 times. The Soviets were very thorough at wringing all useful information out of the reluctant, and damage control was essential. How much had Polyakov spilled?
Polyakov had anticipated the possibility of this fate. Back in the 1970s, when asked by his American handler what would happen if he was discovered, his laconic reply was 'Братская могила'--an unmarked grave.
One bleak morning--all mornings were bleak in Soviet prison--his guards came to his cell, and escorted him to a courtyard or a featureless concrete room, and he was forced to his knees. Then he received what the Russians refer to obliquely as высшая мера--the highest measure. It comes in the form of a bullet to the back of the head. And so ended the career of a brave and idealistic American agent. Pravda acknowledged Polyakov's execution two years later.
Why did General Polyakov meet this grim and pitiless fate?
The architect of his discovery was a nebbishy non-entity who worked for the CIA. His name was Aldrich Ames. He was one of the most damaging enemy spies in our history. And he is the awful human being in our story.
I wanted a traitor on this list, but I sadly had a number to sort through. Let me tell you about a few of the ones I considered and discarded.
Robert Hansen, the other great spy who corroborated much of what Ames told the Soviets, was nearly as destructive. He was a better spy, and he was, incongruously, deeply Catholic; I expect Mr. Hansen will have his hands full in Purgatory, if the doctrine of his faith holds, so I'll leave him to it. But there were at least some indications of genuine remorse in his case.
Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg, David Greenglass, Morris and Lana Cohen, these I passed over because as damaging and treacherous as they undoubtedly were, they actually believed the mythology the Soviet Union promulgated about itself. It's easy to look back, knowing what we know now about the purges, the gulags, the Holodomor, and despise the Soviets for what they were--brutal totalitarian enemies of human flourishing. But in 1945, one could still plausibly believe that maybe Uncle Joe wasn't that bad. He was against Hitler, right?
Going way, way back, I am also going to pass over Benedict Arnold, the Ur-traitor. Before we continue, I would like to reflect on something Orson Welles once said--"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."
Consider someone like Rudy Guiliani. Had he died of a heart attack in 2003 it is probable he would be remembered today as the beloved mayor who brought New York back from the brink, and stood like a titan when the towers were crumbling. There would be statues of him, looking out into the skyline, a balding, mournful bronze. Instead he lived on. I will leave it to your own consideration what sort of man he is now, but putting it delicately, he is perhaps not the iconic hero he was.
The same with Arnold. Had he died from his wounds after the battle of Saratoga*, he would be revered as one of that generation of lions that bought us our independence, spoken of in the same breath with the likes of Horatio Gates. His combat record was one of audacity, wild courage, and inspirational leadership.
But he lived, lived to ponder the ways he was wronged, and lived to marry a woman of Tory sympathies who was young, pretty and quite persuasive. And thus began the metamorphosis of the man who would later be called the American Judas.
Returning to Ames, I find him more contemptible than any of these. He lacked Arnold's headstrong courage, and the larval America Arnold betrayed was not yet a thing to be cherished in quite the same way it was later, perhaps. The Brits on my list might be forgiven for thinking, 'thank God General Arnold finally saw reason, and God bless Peggy Shipton.' And time, exile, and living with his memories were probably punishment enough.
Ames was more contemptible than the ideologues that betrayed our nuclear program. As wrong as they were, they acted largely from idealism. Wrong and destructive, but not, at its heart, evil. Ames was different.
Aldrich Ames betrayed his country for money. Cash. Kitchen remodels, a nice Jaguar, and some sharp suits. Guys like Polyakov languished in cells and took a bullet to the back of the head so Ames could get his teeth whitened, and keep his wife in expensive shoes.
His tradecraft wasn't bad, although he was not in Hansen's league. But he was dumb enough to spend the money, fairly conspicuously, which is a clear sign of concern when looking for a mole. Had he continued to live like a mid-level bureaucrat, it's possible the Agency might never have found him.**
The net closed in, and he was nabbed in 1994. As befits a man of his atrophied principles, he cooperated, which probably saved his life and allowed the CIA to figure out how deep the damage was. Turns out, it was pretty bad. He compromised 30 agents, of which 10 wound up being executed. That puts Ames at a paltry 2 rippers, but he also compromised a whole bunch of other technical intelligence programs, the downstream effects of which were more diffuse but no less grievous.
He is still alive. He is 83, serving life without the possibility of parole at the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana.
In the first part of the Divine Comedy, Dante places sinners in sort of a descending ranked structure of awfulness. You work your way down through the Lustful, the Greedy, The Wrathful, and finally you wind up at the very bottom, the Ninth circle of hell. This is the home of the Treacherous. There are gradations even here; those who betray their kin or tribe are imprisoned in a lake of ice, but their heads and necks are exposed, allowing them a bit of movement and the ability to speak. Those who have betrayed their guests have it worse; they are buried up to the nose, and their eyes are sheathed in ice, depriving them even of the consolation of weeping. According to Dante's scheme, in a few years time Ames will probably find himself betwixt these two in Antenora: the home of those who betray their countries. But the fact that treachery is the absolute bottom rung of human awfulness according to Dante accords well with my own distaste for this guy.
But I don't think you would find COL Claus Von Staufenberg down there waiting for the Devil's Zamboni. I think context matters. The people Ames betrayed were also spies working against their country, or at least their country's government. But I don't think they are at all morally equivalent to Ames, because I do not think, for all her manifold warts, that the USA is equivalent to the USSR. And that makes it even a bit worse: By 1980, there was no disguising what the Soviet Union was. Ames knew. But I guess he really, really wanted that Jaguar.
Next time: The Indian Killer.
t
* The memorial of the battle of Saratoga contains four niches, one each for the four great American heroes from that encounter. Three are occupied by the bronze statues of Gates, Morgan and Schuyler. The fourth is left empty. It speaks to the hero who is lost to ignominy. Another monument, the boot monument, was erected to honor an unnamed Major General, wounded on the spot, fighting like a lion, and is dedicated to "the most brilliant soldier in the continental Army." That soldier is unnamed. There is an apocryphal tale that on his deathbed, Arnold said 'let me be buried in the old uniform in which I fought my battles. May God forgive me for ever having put on another.'
** In 1974 the CIA finally put the brilliant but increasingly erratic spymaster James Jesus Angleton out to pasture, as a part of the Church commission reforms. He was the director of counterintelligence and was feared and resented for his relentless mole hunting and willingness to engage in somewhat problematic practices such as domestic surveillance (Operation CHAOS is one example). It was in this newly reformed organization, less paranoid, more 'realistic', that Aldrich Ames contacted the Russians, and spied for them undetected for nearly a decade. Say what you will of Angleton, but there were no mole penetrations of such appalling destructiveness under his watch. I think Angleton was entirely right--The counterintelligence function in an organization should assume the organization is penetrated until proven otherwise. That approach might have shortened Ames' malign career.
P.S.- I have an addendum, a sort of mid-cycle awful person who revealed themselves this week at Cambridge! Probably not American, but you never know.
What you see happened at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the UK. This person, to express their displeasure at the ongoing conflict between the Israelis and Hama taking place in Gaza, slashed the 110 year old painting of Arthur Balfour* with a box cutting knife.
My sympathies on the underlying issue tend to be, with some caveats, pro-Israel. But there are lots of other ways that you can care about the plight of Palestinian Arabs and register your displeasure with the actions of the Israeli government that are well within the acceptable parameters of political discourse--and far less likely to cause backlash.
But for me? I want to beat this person with my fists. Hard. This painting was the work of dozens, perhaps hundreds of hours. The painter, Philip Laszlo, studied for many years to achieve the level of proficiency required to produce this painting. It was first hung when Lloyd George was prime Minister, and had lasted through 20 of his successors. It looked down on undergraduates at Cambridge during the Blitz. It saw the Beatles come and go. It survived the Suez Crisis, the malaise of the 70s, Cool Britannia, it even survived the near instantaneous implosion of Liz Truss. But it couldn't survive this cretin, who could no more produce an equivalent work of art than fly to the moon.
No arrests have, as yet, been made. Cambridge issued a press release, expressing tepid regret. I suspect all over the world, art curators are making plans to create barriers between the barbarians public and the works of art in their custodianship. A layer of intervening plexiglass is about the least we can expect, going forward. Mark it well, I suspect the age of being able to go up to a painting and look at it and interact with it, close and unobstructed, is ending right now. There is a certain social trust required for that; and that social trust has just been proved wanting.
Worse than the wreck of the painting itself: what does this say about the values and training of this person? What if it proves to be a student at Cambridge, one of the world's greatest universities? What does that say about how she is being indoctrinated? What she holds sacred? What she doesn't?
One last detail. The backpack she is wearing in the picture is a Mulberry Cara, which sells for £850.
t
* Former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour is the subject of the destroyed painting as well as a British Statesman and Diplomat; he was the author of the Balfour declaration. It is regarded as a milestone of the Zionist enterprise to repatriate European Jews to the area which comprises modern-day Israel and Palestine. Balfour was clearly in sympathy with the enterprise, but stipulated explicitly that the political rights of the Palestinian Arabs should be safeguarded as well. Like virtually all leaders of the time, his record and opinions are in some measure objectionable by modern standards; but I suspect that might work both ways. If Arthur Balfour traveled through time from 1917 and found himself in the London (or New York, or Paris) of today, what do you think he would make of things? What would he make of the person who slashed his painting?