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CHAPTER 20 The NSA’s Back Door You have private for-profit companies doing inherently govern- mental work like targeted espionage, surveillance, compromising foreign systems. And there’s very little oversight, there’s very little review. —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2014 Px: TO SNOWDEN’S THEFT of NSA documents, the single most shattering blow to the confidence of the U.S. intelligence com- munity was the 1994 exposure of Aldrich Ames as a long-serving Russian mole in the CIA. Ames, it will be recalled, had been a high- ranking CIA officer, working at the CIA’s Counterintelligence Cen- ter Analysis Group, before he was arrested by the FBI. He had also worked as a mole for Russian intelligence. In a plea bargain to avoid a death sentence (he was sentenced to life imprisonment), he admitted that he had successfully burrowed into the CIA and had worked there for over nine years on behalf of the KGB. His description of his sub-rosa activities as a mole was part of the plea bargain. This stunning revelation shook the CIA leader- ship to its core. Until then, CIA executives steadfastly denied that it was possible that the KGB could sustain a mole in American intel- ligence. The Ames arrest also led the NSA to reassess its own vul- nerability to penetration. Could there be an Ames inside the NSA? | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 209 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019697