Betrayal.

If ever there was a clarion call for a good hard look at the practice of espionage in the post-Cold War world, Aldrich H. Ames provides it. In need of money in the mid-eighties, Ames, a 30-year CIA veteran, turned to spying for Moscow, exposing every major American spy to the Soviets. Characterized by colleagues and investigators as lazy and inept, he somehow managed to avoid detection for nine years before his arrest in February 1994, even as he pocketed over $2.7 million.

How could the Soviets have penetrated the CIA so deeply? Why would a veteran agent suddenly turn to the KGB? Moreover, why did it take nine years for the CIA and FBI to recognize the obvious signs that Ames was on the take? Three new books take stabs at the Ames case: Nightmover by David Wise; Killer Spy by Peter Maas; and Betrayal by David Johnston, Neil A. Lewis, and Tim Weiner, the three New York Times reporters who covered Ames. Each book is layered with the intrigue of espionage, but even taken together, the three leave many of the fundamental questions raised by the Ames case unanswered.

The books succeed, however, in one very important area. In the process of tracking Ames over his three decades in the CIA, the authors give a valuable portrait of Agency culture, particularly the practice of recruiting spies. With a few exceptions, CIA operations officers and FBI counterintelligence regarded recruiting Russian spies as their chief mission. Recruiting is clearly one of the foundations of intelligence, and as portrayed in these books, it has a lot to answer for.

Ames first tried his hand at recruiting in Turkey in 1971. Never mind that it was too difficult for the rookie recruiter Ames to turn a seasoned KGB officer, Wise writes: "A young first-tour officer was not expected to do much more than try." If a Soviet couldn't be snared, the ethic held, then recruit someone, anyone. One of Ames's superiors in Turkey ordered him to recruit a Pakistani second secretary as an "access agent." Pakistan, of course, was on our side. What benefit the CIA would reap from a low-level bureaucrat within a friendly government wasn't the kind of question one asked; spies were collected for their own sake.

Ten years later, Ames, who by this time had shown little talent at recruiting, was sent to Mexico. There he set out after no less a person than the chief Soviet counterintelligence official in Mexico, one Igor I. Shurygin. It was around this time that Ames began to show signs that he had been turned. One CIA analyst reviewing Ames's reports on the meetings, Wise writes, concluded in 1985 that "Ames had not been getting anywhere in developing Shurygin." Moreover, he adds, "it looked more like Shurygin was developing Ames rather than the other way around." Yet only Wise seems to explore the relationship in any depth; the other two mention Shurygin only in passing.

The CIA, of course, ignored the Shurygin-Ames relationship completely. Like any bureaucracy, the Agency is violently reluctant to admit to its failures. And no failure stings the CIA as much as losing one of its own to the KGB.

The CIA let Ames continue with his hapless recruiting efforts. Upon his return to Washington to take a key desk position as chief of the Soviet counterintelligence branch, Ames sold his bosses on the idea that he ought to go after Soviets assigned to the embassy. Apparently, it never concerned anyone that Ames, loaded with information about every American spy in the U.S.S.R., might use these recruiting meetings as cover for his own opening ventures as a spy.

Moreover, no one asked whether we needed another spy in the Soviet Embassy. The FBI, Maas writes, was already handling two KGB officers out of the Embassy: Lieutenant Colonel Valery F. Martynov and Major Sergei M. Motorin. Both were recruited by FBI operatives in the early-eighties only to be exposed to the Soviets by Ames.

In part, the two spies helped the FBI recruit more Soviets who, one supposes, would then have told us which of their colleagues might have made further FBI recruits. This game of spy marbles played by the CIA and KGB is entertaining, for sure. But it raises the question, how much penetration is enough? It reminds me of the old saying that toward the end of J. Edgar Hoover's time most members of the U.S. Communist Party were paid agents of the FBI.

The books also fail to answer why Ames decided to become a spy in the first place. To date, we have only Ames's own unsatisfying explanation that the need for money suddenly overcame his fear of discovery. FBI polygraphs show that he may have been lying about his motivations, but these authors seem to take him at his word.

The reason the Ames case calls for greater probing is that it shows how easy it was for an agent to betray his country once he decided to take the first step. Loyalty to the Agency and fear of being caught faded from Ames's mind easily. This isn't very surprising. Loyalty and fear are hard to instill in a bureaucracy whose mission is neither clear-cut nor important. With the disappearance of the Soviet threat, the CIA's bloated ranks have sought new missions, some cloudy and insignificant, paving the way, perhaps, for more Ameses.

Those who appreciate how we journalists reflect our sources will find a fine example in how the books deal with the question of why the FBI didn't open its criminal case until five months after the joint CIA/FBI task force determined that Ames was the number-one suspect.

Wise, with his heavy CIA input, says the "CIA mole hunters" were ready for the FBI to start the case against Ames in January 1993. A delay developed, "when the FBI decided to await the final report of the joint CIA/FBI mole-hunt team before moving." There was also disagreement within the FBI "over whether there was sufficient evidence to open a full-fledged counterintelligence investigation of Ames."

Maas, on the other hand, who wrote the book with FBI cooperation, states that by December 1992 FBI Deputy Director Robert M. "Bear" Bryant "had seen enough.... He wanted to open an official investigation immediately.... But the CIA resisted furiously. Bryant just didn't understand the seriousness, the delicacy, of what was at stake. This concerned a career agency operations officer. Something like this was without parallel. You had to be absolutely certain."

Underpinning any discussion of the Ames case should be the understanding that Ames's aid to Moscow, the worst security failure in CIA history, had little, if any, effect on the Cold War in general. Despite the fact that America's clandestine efforts in the Soviet Union were crippled by Ames for a few years, we still won the Cold War. Does anyone really believe that things would have changed at all had Ames not exposed the CIA's Soviet spy network? Today, the CIA can't afford the overblown rosters and overlooked mistakes of the past. Perhaps that is what scares the CIA about the Ames affair. Smaller threats should mean fewer case officers recruiting even fewer, but more sharply targeted, agents. If the CIA continues to put foreign agents on the U.S. payroll at high levels worldwide for their own sake, without regard for what they accomplish, its critics can fairly ask, why continue to do it at all?