Acts of Betrayal, Part One: Hearts and Minds

Betrayal is a complicated act of “deliberate disloyalty” that can shock and unravel the fabric of any relationship. But when an intelligence officer is caught working for the other side, the damage is amplified - shattering the hard-won trust among colleagues and spy agencies that’s essential to doing effective intelligence work. The reasons why an officer might defect, however, can vary widely and have implications of their own.

Join Jack and Julia for a colorful conversation about what motivated historic double agents like Kim Philby and Aldrich “Rick Ames” to defect, and the consequences of their betrayal.

On this episode we’ll discuss:

• Why the famous British intelligence officer Kim Philby chose to defect and how he managed to get away with it for so long
• Jack’s take on the motivations of fellow CIA officer Rick Ames – including personal insights as to why Ames defected
• The dangerous impact of high-level intelligence betrayals on both individual lives and global operations

Transcript

The Arkin Group
Hello everyone and welcome to Straight From the Shoulder, the podcast where we strive to analyze geopolitical events through the apolitical lens of intelligence officers. I'm Julia Stone, Senior Director of the Arkin Group. And for the past 15 years, I've worked in both public and private sector intelligence. I'm here with Spymaster Jack Devine, former Acting Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA and the founder and president of The Arkin Group.

Julia:
When it happens, it usually comes as a shock. The fragile human agreement of a shared reality shatters into a million pieces. And once you learn the extent of it, you'll want to do everything in your power to make sure it never happens again. That's right- today, we're going to be discussing the act of betrayal.

Betrayal is a complicated act of deliberate disloyalty, and it can forever make us question the motives and intentions of those in our innermost circle. Jack, you and I have been chatting a lot about infamous defectors in the spy world, and perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of betrayal is the motivation behind it. Why would someone be compelled to betray their agency or their country in the first place?

After reviewing some of the most impactful cases of betrayal, I think we can roughly put the motivations into several buckets. Ideological, psychological, financial, or even coercion. So let's begin by examining a defector who was motivated by ideology and whose legacy still reverberates today. Jack, can you tell us a little bit about Kim Philby?

Jack:
I thought that was a great introduction, Julia. And I think we're going to come back to it because I think you'd rightly divided up the different motivations. So we're going to get to it. Philby's unique from Ames and Ames and so on. We can, we'll be able to put them in the right categories. 

I just wanted to touch on one other thing that you said, that is you never want it to happen. You really don't want it to happen. It's your worst day. And the truth of the matter is, it is going to happen again. And you have to be constantly vigilant. And I remember, and I think people thought I was being difficult when the Ames case broke, they eventually, someone on the executive office decided that we should all wear buttons, “Never Again” - I refused to wear it. And the reason I refused to wear it is because my belief is there's always a Kim Philby. There's always- hopefully not at that caliber or Ames' caliber.

And I also knew that Robert Hanssen, I didn't know who it was. Everybody thought it was the CIA. So, I think you're right. It's just one of those dreadful things you never want to happen, but you better be organized to deal with it. 

People are fascinated by Kim Philby. And those who don't know, he was a famous spy. Most of Le Carre's books are actually focused on what motivated Philby, the spy. Tinker Taylor, it could have been, they could have named him Philby and the dynamics are very well done by Le Carre. But what was interesting about the Philby case, it wasn't just him- there was the Cambridge five, there were five people of considerable education. Their families served in different parts of the government and they went on to become superstars in their government. And in the case of Maclean, and Burgess, although Burgess became a hazard for everybody because he was a two-fisted drinker. So it was the combination of the group and Philby's position that I think kept people being so interested. 

And what I wanted to say is, you know, I did a talk the other night at one of the clubs and I was signing some of the books on the Spymaster's Prism and at least two people came out. I think it was three. So aren't we gonna talk about Philby? So he's an enduring legend. And I think we should talk about why that might be. 

Julia:
That's fascinating, Jack. One of the things you're hinting at there is that Philby was a man of society. He had the pedigree of a fancy British establishment gentleman, right? So he was able to sort of sneak in and out of worlds or smoothly enter that world and be trusted. But you'd assume that with that pedigree, everyone around him would share the understanding of how Britain fit into the world and what their role was and why they should be, you know, everybody else was inferior, essentially. But there was somebody very close to Philby who had a sizable impact on his worldview, right? 

Jack:
So I think we need to take a couple points and think about where we are in history when we talk about this. Britain was a class society. One would argue it still has strong strains of that. This became an asset for Philby. In other words, a gentleman doesn't spy for the other side. It's inconceivable. So they didn't look internally. We're gonna see this at Hanssen. We'll see it in the agency as well, where institutions look at espionage of their own as unlikely, even though they're recruiting spies at other places. I know it's an oxymoron. But in his case, you have to remember in the 30s, the world was looking at communism actually even earlier, it was the 20s, but communism and many leftist liberal circles was a possible idyllic alternative to democracy. In other words, all power to the workers. And so he was actually a rebel against his own class as a young person.

And his father was, I'd said, a famous, in fact, he was in the British service himself. So it was a little bit of rebellion there. So he started dating a communist, a woman, he fell in love with her. And she had a great influence on, you know, moving him around in the communist party. And what happened at one point, she introduced him to an actual party member. And she basically introduced him to a Russian KGB officer. 

Julia:
And I was just going to ask, how was he recruited? 

Jack:
So she knew about it. So people knew back there. If you did that type of an investigation today, you would hope you would find out he was a member. You know, he was active in the Communist Party. And that should be, you know, that would have been a showstopper. You couldn't get in CIA as a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. So she did have a great influence on him. He left her and it intrigues me whether he left her because he loved the communist ideology or he left his wife because he had abandoned communism and he had to get rid of his wife. So it might've been, you know, hard feelings or whatever, but they split up. 

Julia:
You mean to suggest that he had to get rid of her because she was like a liability and it would have alerted everyone to the fact that he was actually working for the Russians? 

Jack:
I think Philby, when he met the KGB officer- he thought he'd become an activist in the Communist Party as a source of the KGB. He said, what are you crazy? You want to get away from it. You've got the right credentials. You want to get back to your motherland. You want to be the most conservative person you can find. You want to become an anticommunist. So what Philby did is he then returned to his old friends, the new Kim Philby, right? 

But also, the world by then, you had Stalin. Communism was not as fashionable and people tolerated, looked at, well, that was just the twenties and early thirties. And so they didn't know this, at least they say they don't, but there were people, there was a woman that eventually later on inside the service that said, look, he was active in the communist party. 

Julia:
I think that we can learn a lot of lessons actually from this, which is that sometimes our greatest enemy, looks like our friend or it's someone that we would never assume to be the defector. And that other times, of course, we might not hire somebody based on our own prejudice, someone that might be more ideologically-minded with our cause actually than what seems to meet the eye upon first glimpse. But I'm curious about Philby- I mean, I know he was very important in that British organizational structure there, but did he ever work in the United States?

Jack:
Well, that was one of his key jobs and why it left the tremendous bitter aftertaste is, Philby was the liaison representative. In other words, for the MI6, the British intelligence service, he was the head man. He was the one that was gonna deal with the agency, the FBI. And in those days, less so today, I'm not saying that we didn't wine and dine with the Brits, I certainly had a good glass of wine or two with him. But those days there was the two martini lunch, which is somewhat unfathomable today because they make them with five shots each -incoherent. Well, part of it is though you’re a spy, God knows what you're saying over lunch. So he was close, including with James Angleton, who was the head of counterintelligence in CIA. So he was a key player for sure in that American setting.

Julia:
So how did his betrayal impact the relationship between the Americans and the British? 

Jack:
It was devastating. In fact, if you watch some of the, I think it's Tinker, Taylor, part of the plot is, I'm going to do this to make the Americans like us, right? Because how do you get back into good graces? And so it's based on Le Carre's sort of recollection of that sentiment about the Americans don't want to talk to us. And they actually came up with a theory that Philby stopped working for the Russians in ‘49. No one believes that, but that way they could go to the CIA. He didn't really pass anything that was important, but he was, as I said, James Angleton was the head of counterintelligence. He was the big spy hunter, and I'm sure we'll get into him at some point. So I think he felt betrayed. I think it was personal with Angleton. 

And he knew when you get into that set, it's not like you're meeting a spy at night. You're meeting the players. You're meeting policy people in Washington. You're a player and a British diplomat of his rank. Who knows what he picked up besides just a recruiting agent. But he was surrounded by the other two Cambridge Five members, which I think makes it very suspicious. Maclean was there and Burgess was drinking - and Burgess actually stayed with him, and he, the both of them defected. So you would have thought there would have a spotlight on all of that left a huge strain in the relationship that took years to rebuild. 

Julia:
Well, it's really astounding that we can think about one person kind of slipping through the cracks, but a whole gang, you know, whole group of them. It probably was really an embarrassment as well. Paranoia within the agency. 

Jack:
Well, I don't think that was the case, Julia, because that was Philby- the Brits had that problem. We don't have that problem, right?

Juila:
Oh of course- and it's never gonna happen again!

Jack:
No, no, but remember, in the United States, we're not talking the 1930s. Start with the 50s. We had a red wave in the United States, you know, the state, here's 200, Joe McCarthy's Senator for Wisconsin. The State Department has 200 Communist Party members. The CIA is riddled with them. So you had a mindset in the United States that was very staunchly concerned about penetrations and spies and spy hunting. So when you get around to the paranoia, what happened in the case of the CIA- which is still very controversial- has been written to extensively. 

There was a Soviet defector who came out, and he plays a big part in later in the Philby story, we should return to that. But when he came out, he said- let me explain to you as a KGB officer- we are sending all types of spies out that aren't real. In other words, we're running them against you. We're trying to find out who you are. Their questions will help us understand things. We're running double agents. And by the way, we have penetrations within your system. Okay. 

And then to get to the famous telling Angleton, there's a Sasha. And this is where the internal, you use the word paranoia- and that's a medical term, but it may indeed be true. But I think Angleton, after the Philby experience and then hearing Golitsyn talk about it - he started looking- he was looking at a lot of people in the CIA. And I think I might be off by the letter of the alphabet, but Golitsyn said, it's somebody with a “K”. So Angleton pulled all the files of people that had Eastern Europe or Russian orientation and look for “K”, and their careers were sidetracked. 

The development recruitment part of Russians failed and there's some really tragic stories, but again, we can spend this whole session on that phase of American history and its agency. There was a revulsion against it eventually. And when Angleton was actually dismissed later on because of some of these hard feelings inside of the agency about this, as you said, paranoia. 

Julia:
I think that it takes a negative toll in so many ways, because with that kind of paranoia or however we're categorizing it, you just can't actually do your job right. Like if you're always suspicious, I think of it like a terrorist attack or something. And then you're on the subway and you're looking at everyone like a suspect and you're so busy looking around that you've lost track of, you know, going to pick up your kid or whatever it was you were supposed to be doing, because it's so distracting to think of everybody as potentially against you.

And when you're in an intelligence agency, you're trusting people with your information, right? Like you're trusting that they're not going to share it. And you're also trusting the information that they get is legitimate or at least potentially legitimate. So it really sort of deconstructs the fundamental building blocks of how to have an effective intelligence operation. If you can't secure your information and you can't necessarily assess the information that's coming in.

Jack:
So much of teamwork, you have to count on the person beside you. But there's another ring in hell that's deeper, and that is you don't know. And they're looking at you as a spy and you're walking around and you don't know it. And then if you find out later, it's a crushing, crushing blow. In fact, the end of that story, the CIA lawyers eventually went to the people and said, you should sue us for damages and they did, but you can't repay the damage that you're talking about. That is when you have been under the spotlight and been suspicious, you're looked with great suspicion, it's devastating. And I knew one of them, one of them was an instructor.

Julia:
Wow. Just to wrap up Philby for our discussion right now - and he might come back up - I'd love to move on to a few other examples of defectors, but how did Philby get caught and what was that process like afterwards? 

Jack:
Well, first of all, as I said, there was a woman who came forward from within the service and said, let me tell you something about Philby you may not know. He was a member of the communist party. But as I said, they took that lightly. It was a more liberal orientation to sense, yeah, everybody was a communist when they were kids. And they didn't get the full import of it. But I think she was, if I recall, and I could be wrong on this, she said he was actually an agent, but I could be wrong on that part, but she definitely flagged him as a communist. But the way they really found him was Golitsyn, who came out and met with Angleton, as I told you a while ago. He named a lot of people. 

Julia:
Who was Golitsyn?

Jack:
Well, Golitsyn was a member of the KGB. As I was saying earlier, he defected and came and Angleton was handling him. He is the one that was saying all those spies are going to be run against you, right? One of them that he identified was Kim Philby. That was the nail in the coffin, so to speak. I will tell you the British service and everything I read was divided. They still didn't buy it, right? Just because we said it was true or our source said it was true. So, but that is where he was really nailed and identified as a member of the ideologically oriented penetration of the British service. 

Julia:
And then was he, I mean, did he take safe harbor in Russia? Well, in Soviet Russia at that time?

Jack:
No, because you have to prove it. And this is why there was more strain because the people of the agency were saying, look, Philby's a spy. We know him, we know what he knew. You gotta clean it up. And there was still loyalty to him. But eventually they decided after the Golitsyn revelation that he was, but he was sent to Beirut. And it's a very interesting story. He lived in Beirut as a journalist. And again, I could go on in some length, but he hung out at the bar across the street and was friends with everybody that was in the British embassy and collected intelligence. 

But one day the Brits sent out one of his friends from the service and knocked on Philby's door. And it was supposed to be someone else. Someone else was supposed to visit him and Philby was waiting for that person. When the knock came and the door opened, Philby said, I knew it would be you that would come to talk to me. So they spent a better part of the day talking about it. They had a confession in front of Philby to sign, but it also said 1949, I could be wrong on that again. But the next day they couldn't find Philby. 

And the reason they couldn't find him, he knew that this was up, so he- as I recall, he went by ship and to Turkey and lived in Moscow until his dying days. And he was a hero in their system, but they never thought he trusted them. And this is the thing that people that do this don't really recognize- they expect to be, I think he was told to be a colonel, no, a general in the KGB, but he never was. They gave him a little apartment and he was brought in to give a speech here and there, but he went from being somebody in his own service and to being sort of this odd fit in the Soviet warehouse. 

It's my understanding that regardless of his maybe lower status than he thought he would get, that he remained an ideological believer. And his ideology was what motivated him. And it seems that he probably held onto that, or at least publicly held onto that for his whole life. 

His wife went with him to Moscow and put up with it for a while and they split up. And she said that, you know, he- first of all, he'd never learned Russian. He only read British papers, particularly the cricket scores. You know, he followed British politics, never really integrated himself to try and become a Russian citizen, though there was, he was still a British gentleman. And was a heavy drinker. He was a heavy drinker throughout his career, but they were the society, that particular society of people working abroad, there was a lot of heavy drinking, you wouldn't stand out. But I think he died from drinking. And when he died, his wife said, at the end, despite all this disappointment with Russia he still believed he did the right thing and that he was ideologically committed to the communist view of life. Maybe- I take it with a grain of salt. I have trouble, I just can't get my head around it. I just can't buy that. But I'll take it at face value. She didn't have an axe to grind to make up a story.

Julia:
Let's move on now to another heavy drinker who got himself into quite a bit of trouble, got us all into a bit of trouble, and that's Aldrich Ames. Aldrich Ames, we would put into a different bucket, right, Jack, in terms of his motivation for defecting? 

Jack:
There's a lot of dissimilarities between him and Philby, which I'm sure we'll dig into. 

Julia:
Jack, you knew Ames personally, right? 

Jack:
Yeah, I have- maybe I'll sum up my mixed feelings about that experience. So I knew him as a young man. He was a young man and he was about to get into the CT program. I was going to be in the next round at that time. And he was a staunch anticommunist. Now his social politics were rather liberal, but on national security he was an anticommunist - and later on I understand there was an incident, the drinking incident, which I read about the other day, when he got into an argument with a Cuban official. So you don't get into a Cuban official if you're sympathetic to the communist orientation. So he, and I remember him standing there one day saying, Jack, you gotta understand counterintelligence, the Russians and it's the ace of spades. What does that say about the ace of diamonds? It's close, I don't know.

But he was with us and he put his career, he put his money where his mouth was and he got into the Russia division, learned Russian. He was a mediocre officer, we’ll get into it. But he was a true believer at the beginning when I met him. So I knew him quite well. We exchanged books, which if I had kept it, it'd probably be worth something on eBay. He gave me a book called The Coffin for Demetrius, which was a classic double -agent story, right?

Later, I'll get to the later part of it. He gives me this book. I gave him one on the psychopathology of leadership done by some social psychologists. I think Robert Lastmore of the 30s about what makes people tick. You're going to be a liberal if you're born this way, you're going to be this. So when you think about the interplay between the two of us. So when he was in Rome he invited us to dinner. He was a communist agent at that time with his wife, Rosario. And he said, Jack, I have something that belongs to you- goes to his bookcase and he said, here's your book back. I should have had him sign it, as the CIA's worst spy. So that would have meant something. 

Julia:
Did you ever imagine that Ames could be a spy? 

Jack:
Well, his life changed. After he went into training I really didn't see him I went abroad for several years. He went in a different direction. I think I ran into him maybe 20 some years later in the hall.

And he was, and I was really, Rick, how are you doing? And he was working inside the CE, the Russia unit. And his career was marching along, but it didn't have a lot of fire in it. And I think I was more senior at the time and it might've been an awkward moment. But I didn't, at that point I was still assuming, I believed he was still an anticommunist- I don't think he got into this because he was favorably disposed towards the Russians. I think his motivations are quite different and interesting. 

Julia:
Well, I'm interested to hear about his motivations. Jack, why did he choose to betray his country?

Jack:
Most people that knew him as I did, he really didn't care about material things. I mean, he smoked - his teeth. He could have used the whole rework over, which he did years later. His clothes, he might've worn the same shirt a couple of times. He just didn't care. I think in a way he's happy in prison because he could be there just reading books, smoking a cigarette, and if they would let him have a glass of wine, he'd be, you know, he would be okay.

It wasn't the money, but then he married a second wife. I knew the first wife who was a delightful analyst and I'm sure she's full of stories, but Rick had gone through a number of things, his career had taken a turn. It was rocky, but he met a diplomat, a Colombian diplomat in Mexico and married her. And she was supposed to have come from Colombian high class. And the truth of the matter is she came from Colombian family that had roots, but the money disappeared. And like the woman that outed Philby, there was a woman in the middle of the investigation of Ames, if you fast forward, who came forward and said, look, you need to understand, Rosario didn't have a dime to her name. But she had 500 pairs of shoes when they arrested her. I mean, she had a number of designer dresses that were not unwrapped from their bags.

She needed the money, she needed the money for the parents, and she thought she married a high-flying CIA officer and that she was going to be taking care of it. He wasn't cutting it. So money became a factor. Would it have pushed the Rick I knew across the line? I don't know, but he also was a heavy drinker. So when he went in to be recruited, he sat across the street from the embassy and I think he had three gin and tonics, I think.

Julia:
I hope that our listeners are enjoying this podcast during their happy hour because you've mentioned so many different cocktails at this point. I mean, people, I can hear people pouring something over ice in the background. 

Jack:
They don't call it demon rum for nothing. So the point is, money wasn't the motivation, but she, so, you know, she got him, he had new teeth and this and the other, but the CIA was thinking, well, he's living off of her. He's a kept man. I mean, not as crass as that, but so that's where that went. But his motivation is different. And I think it's in a lot of them, both sides. This is where Philby's interesting, we'll get to that. But in this case, this is why the book I gave him is interesting. His psychology, who he was and where he was in the business and where he was in the system, I think was a real factor in it. 

In other words, he thought he was smarter than all of his colleagues. He was a smart guy. A lot of smart guys in CIA. You don't want to be too smart, you're a genius and you're dysfunctional, but they're a pretty smart crowd. So he would not stand out. Okay, trust me, he would not stand out. But let's allow he was a smart guy. But he was lazy and he only wanted to do what he wanted to do. He wanted to be the ace, he wanted to work on the ace of spades. He couldn't, he didn't want to do other things. So when he liked something, he did it. If he didn't, he didn't.

He didn't do his accounting, sloppy. So his career languished. He ended up as a perennial GS -15. GS -15 is a position of honor. It's, I would say, colonel or a light colonel. It's a success, right? But if you think you're a genius, you think you're the four star general. So I think he began to think the system didn't understand it. And you never look in the window like, well, maybe my bosses don't appreciate me because, you know, I'm, you know, I'm not hustling. I'm not out there. I'm doing my thing. And, you know, you'll be a good debriefer. Maybe you can handle Russian cases. And he did a couple of them very well in New York and was given accommodation. But there were two things he wanted to do, but he wouldn't do anything else.

So I think at a certain point, look at all these people passing me by. The system is against me and almost every defector – we’ll get to Hanssen. It's the same thing. They don't appreciate me. They don't know how good I am. It's the suits. They're getting me- they're putting me down. And I think that contributed and his combination of the drink, having drinks in his hand, a wife wanting money and him feeling “I'm never going to be who I thought I could be and I'm, I'm the neglected child”. 

Julia:
There's a lot of grievances and pressures. How did he get outed? How was it discovered that he was a mole?

Jack:
Well, you know, again, there was a team that was looking for it. They started once and they couldn't figure out who it was. They dissolved it. And then a woman named Jeanne Vertefeuille said, and Sandy Grimes, both talented people, and I know them both well, particularly Sandy because she was in a course with me. But they started grinding down through the files along with four or five other people, Paul Redmond, and I'm not giving out names, these are all public figures today. And one of the women that I said eventually was able to pinpoint that Rosario did not, that doesn't have the money. But, you know, as I've often said, it takes a spy to catch a spy. And I think when we look at Ames, in fact, when we got to the Bureau, we've actually established it was a spy, but you have to prove it. But Ames was outed by another spy, right?
 
That was able to, they got pretty close, but there was uncertainty even in the second to the last round, Ames did not make it to the top position. There were other people that outranked him. The CIA, the two people I told you voted for Ames as the top spy, and there were others there that voted that it was somebody else and they couldn't get it done. But a spy came out and provided the coup de grace. It was hard to put a weight on it, it's so bad. And that is we spend all of our careers trying to recruit penetrations that work inside the Kremlin and the key military installations in Russia. They try and do the same thing. So we had at least 10 of them. And I believe there might've been 11 to the end, but 10 of them that Rick knew personally. 

And he thought he was, as I said, he thought he could handle the KGB and the fellow that was handling him was already handling Hanssen. So together, that experience, you had a first class person handle him. So they played to his ego and everything else. So he even thought he would go in and get $50,000 and give them candy cotton. And what happened is he gave them substantive material. In the second meeting, he gave up all 10 names. So the 10 people were called back. There was a dispute within the Kremlin. And the issue was the KGB did not want to kill them because they wanted to run them. They didn't want to show that they had sources. And what happened is the board was just so steamed at it. They just said, kill them all. And they did. They killed all 10 of them. And I mean, that was a tremendous blow to the agency, but you're killing 10 heroes that really put their lives on the line. Many case officers, people worked with those spies, knew them. And, you know, there was a lot of remorse about it. And so it's a devastating blow. And as you said at the very beginning, you worked for that never happened again. 

And best efforts aside, there was one last thing about that that's really interesting. He was interviewed by a woman on, I forget who, but it was a very good journalist. But it was going along, it was interesting to me, probably people were much more interested, but she asked the question, did you ever have remorse about it? And you would think, well, let me ponder that – a microsecond later he said, “No I didn't- I didn't really have any remorse” - which meant you really had a psychopath in your hands that just didn't have that sensitivity. He actually, there was a fellow that he was really close to. It was a friend. He actually had a friendship with him and he sent him to his death.

Julia:
That's incredibly disturbing. Is that one of the key ways in which - and this will probably be my last question to you, Jack, actually - there's just too much to cover here…so we'll touch Hanssen on a future episode, but what's one of the ways, the main ways that the Ames and Philby cases are different? 

Jack:
Again, it struck me the other night when these two women said, what about Philby? And I said, wow. And when Macintyre wrote a book recently, a couple of years ago, in Philadelphia. Well, who's going to buy that? Well, it was a best seller. People love the story. And I think it's because of what we were talking about earlier. He wasn't a colonel. He was almost, he was a hair away from becoming the head of the British intelligence service. So the story is bigger because he is someone that's part of the club- meeting heads of state, meeting heads of intelligence services, and meeting with the Americans, you're talking about a bigger persona. He also was part of the governing class. He was part of the club. And then you throw in, he was ideologically a communist, and you have an interesting story there, and you say, well, he's part of a group of them. So it teases out into all types of stories, which, you know, Philby made great material for Le Carre - the psychology of it. 

But I think the difference is, you know, Ames, you would say he did it for money and that's not nearly as interesting in doing it ideologically. And it's not really interesting if you're not a policy player. You're almost the head of the, the spy movies are made about the CIA director or the job I had, chief of operations being a spy, right? So that's why I think there's a difference. It's a difference, you use the word, I think, pedigree here.

And it worked to Philby's favor and it wasn't an issue in Ames' case other than he just thought the guy, the person beside you couldn't be a spy. But Philby was part of a tighter, tighter group that was incomprehensible that any of them would betray their beloved country. 

Julia:
This episode of Straight From the Shoulder has been produced by The Arkin Group.