DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997                TAG: 9704150507

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY BROWN H. CARPENTER 

                                            LENGTH:   84 lines

THE UNREPENTANT SPY

CONFESSIONS OF A SPY

The Real Story of Aldrich Ames

PETE EARLEY

Putnam. 364 pp. $27.50.

In the spring of 1985, Aldrich Ames, a high-ranking Central Intelligence Agency spy, betrayed the United States because he needed $50,000 to fend off his creditors. He walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington and offered to sell the Russians all of the CIA secrets that he knew, a considerable number since he was a counterintelligence expert with expertise in Moscow's own notorious spy organization, the KGB.

Ames, who ultimately earned more than $2.5 million for his perfidious services, had handled several Soviet defectors and had access to files on KGB agents who were secretly working for the Americans. He revealed about a dozen of these moles, most of whom were interrogated and given the traditional Communist punishment, a bullet to the back of the head.

Now serving a life term for his nine years of treachery, Ames spent 50 hours in an Alexandria jail recounting his sleazy story to author Pete Earley. The interviews form the basis for Confessions of a Spy, a superb account of one man's fall, as well as a brilliant deflation of the whole espionage game.

Earley, who also chronicled the saga of the Norfolk-based John Walker clan in Family of Spies, meticulously doublechecked Ames' claims with both of the spy's employers: the Central Intelligence Agency and the remnants of the KGB (broken up when Russia left the old USSR).

Earley's book is a detailed, even suspenseful narrative, interspersed with Ames' own lengthy rationalizations, admissions and observations, and with brief comments from those who know him - family, CIA colleagues, KGB handlers.

The technique gives this book the feel of good spy fiction, of life imitating the murky worlds created by the likes of John LeCarre and Robert Littell.

Nothing in Confessions of a Spy indicates any contrition on Ames' part, just a realistic understanding of his position. He got caught redhanded when his lavish lifestyle obviously exceeded his government salary. Life in prison might be better if he revealed everything to his FBI-CIA team of interrogators.

In the CIA, Ames, who spent time in Mexico, New York and Rome as well as Washington, inhabited a world rank with excessive drinking and loose sex. Cash was quickly available to pick up tabs spent while recruiting agents in expensive restaurants. U.S. spies frequently rendezvoused with Soviet counterparts to sound them out. The Russians, of course, were doing the same.

According to Ames, it was amazingly simple to agree to spy for the other side during such a meeting and not be detected. Ames often had CIA permission to chat with his foes over lunch.

``I would love to say that I did what I did out of some moral outrage over our country's acts of imperialism or as a political statement or out of anger toward the CIA or even a love for the Soviet Union,'' Ames told Earley. ``But the sad truth is that I did what I did because of money, and I can't get away from that. I can't defend what I did.''

But this remorse looks revoltingly feigned during other taping sessions when Ames does seem to offer lame excuses for his reprehensible actions:

On his CIA supervisors: ``Some of my bosses were disgusting men who took great joy in seducing the wives of their own employees and viciously destroying officers' careers.''

On the Russians he sold out: ``They knew the risks. Do you believe any of them would have hesitated to have reported me if they had learned my name? So their deaths, while sad to me, are not really my responsibility.''

But even a villain can offer revealing perceptions. Ames says luring foreign nationals to work for another country's intelligence operation is a ``betrayal of trust. One might almost say that this is the defining element, because without it, there is no espionage.''

Ames says that the men in Moscow he betrayed persistently delivered information during the 1970s and '80s on the Soviet Union's continuing decline, but top CIA officials and successive presidential administrations preferred hard-line Cold War conventional wisdom.

Ames' wholesale delivery of U.S. secrets gave the KGB a tremendous advantage over the CIA during the Reagan and Bush administrations. But the Berlin Wall came tumbling down anyway.

Confessions of a Spy should not be confused with the quick-hit, shallow books that often follow a major news event. It offers troubling insights into the American foreign policy mind-set as well as a good story. MEMO: Brown H. Carpenter is a staff editor. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

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