Longer version of my Ames article, focusing also on Philip Agee, author of Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975), founder of CovertAction, John Walker, even Bowe Bergdahl. Spying, traitors come in bizarre forms.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/04/20/aldrich-ames-will-go-down-in-history-as-a-traitor-who-spied-for-the-soviet-union-during-the-cold-war/ 

What ever happened to good old-fashion spying? The Saint? James Bond? Spy mania seems to have come (with 19th c imperialism) and gone (with the collapse of the Soviet Union). In our neoliberal age, with no monolith Bad Guy, spying is mostly about stealing money. Now a high school nerd in Rumania or a clever North Korean might decide to hack, say, banks.

Biden's Cyber Safety Review Board at Homeland Security's first spy-catching assignment was to investigate how Lapsus$, an international teen extortion racket 'impacted some of the biggest companies in the world, in some cases, with relatively unsophisticated techniques.'

Was it being constantly invaded? Stalinist terror? The obscene arms race? Plain old ennui? 

More from Great big book of horrible things (2012)

At #39 (#65 US civil war was a picnic compared to this), Cambodia in 1975 was a bombed-out US-controlled dictatorship. ‘Brother Number One’, Pol Pot was a demented nationalist, devotee of Mao’s cultural revolution, which he succeeded in duplicating to a fault. I.e., millions dead, mass starvation and a megalomaniac Kampuchea uber alles, eradicating not only ‘capitalist roaders’ but all minorities, books, whatever. He took special delight in torturing and killing native Vietnamese, a tiny minority mostly on the border in contested areas. Vietnam took note, and with the Americans finally out of their hair, they took the bait when Cambodians staged border raids. Classic Bismarck.

Reading The great big book of horrible things (2012), I came to the American civil war. Bloody, but well down the list at 65. It was in the works for at least a decade and finally caught fire. Brother fighting brother over a defense of the equality of all vs white nationalism. Messy and cruel, in the end a war of attrition, with the industrial engine flattening the enemy.  

The Union under Lincoln was initially spurned by Britain and France. Schadenfreude for the British and Napoleonic fantasies for the French. The British aristocracy was pro-south but the empire’s merchant rulers wisely didn’t take sides openly. As the north appeared likely to win, the south was abandoned. Literally, as it never really recovered, even today, still mired in its past.