See that mailbox? The blue one. Standard U.S. Postal Service collection box. Nothing special about it. No plaque. No marker. Just a mailbox on a corner in Georgetown.
For nine years, this was how a C-I-A officer signaled the K-G-B.
Aldrich Ames. Thirty-one-year career at the C-I-A. Soviet counterintelligence division — meaning his actual job was catching people who spied for Russia. He was the spy.
In April nineteen eighty-five, Ames walked into the Soviet Embassy and offered his services. First payment — fifty thousand dollars. But the real damage came two months later. At a Georgetown restaurant called Chadwicks — about a mile from here — Ames sat down to lunch carrying a shopping bag. Inside — five to seven pounds of classified documents identifying every C-I-A source inside the Soviet Union. The largest amount of sensitive material ever passed to the K-G-B in a single meeting.
That fall, the K-G-B rolled up every single American agent behind the Iron Curtain. At least ten were
executed. The C-I-A lost nearly all its sources in one stroke.
And Ames just kept going. For nine years. On a sixty-thousand-dollar salary, he paid five hundred and forty thousand dollars cash for a house in Arlington. Bought a Jaguar. Parked it in the C-I-A lot at Langley. Swapped his J-C Penney blazers for fifteen-hundred-dollar Italian silk suits. Monogrammed shirts. Hand-sewn shoes. Fifty tho
