On Jan. 5, Aldrich Ames passed away in federal prison at the age of 84. A 31-year veteran of the CIA, Ames betrayed American defense secrets to the Soviet KGB and revealed the identities of 10 American agents, nine of whom were duly executed by the Communists. As people should know, this traitor was a legacy hire.

His father, Carleton Ames, worked for the CIA in Southeast Asia, and Nancy Segebarth, Ames’s first wife, was a CIA officer. After his divorce, Ames married the Colombian Rosario Casas Dupuy, also a CIA asset, who became his accomplice. CIA bosses said Ames betrayed his country for money, but there was more to it.

During the 1970s, Ames met regularly for lunch with Tomas Kolesnichenko, the New York correspondent of Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper. Through this contact, Ames came to believe that the Soviet Union was not much of a threat, and as he told The New York Times, “I’m going to act on that.” During the 1970s, Ames found support in high places.

President Gerald Ford, briefed daily by the CIA, told the world, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” which was rather like saying today that there is no Islamic domination of Iran. Ford, like our 46^th president, had trouble standing upright, but as Angelo Codevilla explained, this was not a mere Biden-style gaffe.

An intelligence insider from his 20s, Codevilla was one of the few to see the CIA’s full wish list and funding. In 1992, two years before Ames’s arrest, Codevilla authored Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century, which easily could have been titled “Why the CIA is a Bust.” With all its money and assets, the agency “did not see hundreds of millions of people ready to overthrow the communist world” (italics original), and the CIA line on East Germany, Codevilla noted, “had not deviated far from East German propaganda.” It turns out that Ames’s view of the USSR and its colonies was essentially the same as the CIA’s, for a reason.

In 1974, as Codevilla recalled, the CIA fired James Angleton, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which “hurt American CI (counterintelligence) badly.” The mission of U.S. intelligence is to get the secrets of the enemy while protecting our own. Contrary to the people who fired him, Angleton believed the CIA could be penetrated and probably was. In the “deception loop,” which Edward Jay Epstein explained in Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA, a Soviet mole could tell the KGB how the CIA was interpreting its operations. That doubtless explains why it took so long to catch Ames, who was hardly the only traitor.

The John Walker family and their associate, Jerry Whitworth, sold the Soviets the operating manuals for U.S. Navy code machines and volumes of daily settings. “Yet for 16 years,” Codevilla recalled, “U.S. counterintelligence had not a hint of this potentially mortal hemorrhage.” In a similar style, CIA officer William Kampiles sold the USSR the entire operating manual of the KH-11 satellite.

In 1976, two years after the CIA canned Angleton, Fordham University student John Brennan rejected Ford, Carter, and several other left-wing candidates and cast his vote for the Stalinist Gus Hall, candidate of the Communist Party USA. Four years later, the CIA hired Brennan, who never should have gotten through the front door. In the style of Ames’s fascination with the animating philosophy of the USSR, Brennan believed that Islamic jihad was just “a holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal,” and that violence and jihad were “not necessarily synonymous.”

This was doubtless the official view of the CIA, which failed to get ahead of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and radical Islam in general. As Brennan showed in Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad, the CIA had not the slightest clue about the massive attack on Sept. 11, 2001.

In 2013, the president formerly known as Barry Soetoro, Barack Obama, tapped Brennan to head the CIA. By that time, the agency had become a domestic political force, a shift revealed in the subtitle of Brennan’s book, where the enemies of the agency “at home” come first. Consider also Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences by former CIA analyst John Gentry.

“The politicization of intelligence was aimed at Trump,” Gentry notes, and  “the political culture of some IC agencies remains intact, available for reactivation in the event of another serious candidacy by Trump or the election of another Republican president.” Both have now taken place, despite two attempts to assassinate Trump, one nearly successful.

“Intelligence officials abuse their positions to discredit opposition to the Democratic Party, of which they are part,” Codevilla wrote in February 2020. “Complicit with the media, they leverage the public’s mistaken faith in their superior knowledge, competence, and patriotism to vilify their domestic enemies from behind secrecy’s shield.” True to form, in October 2020, Brennan and 50 other intelligence officials signed a letter charging that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation,” which they all knew to be false.

The president of the United States is the only official chosen by all the people in an election. The forces in the CIA awaiting reactivation against Trump, or another Republican president, are as much the betrayers of the American people as Aldrich Ames was. Unlike Ames, they have yet to be held accountable. These moles are now waiting for a Democrat to take the helm and turn them loose against their domestic enemies. They should be exposed and punished now, before they can do more damage.

“Why Are Brennan and Clapper Not in Jail?” wondered Codevilla in 2019. Last October, Rep. Jim Jordan of the House Judiciary Committee referred John Brennan to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. The committee should do the same for Brennan allies deployed on the domestic front, but it’s not just the CIA.

FBI counterintelligence man Robert Phillip Hanssen, who died in prison in 2023, gave the KGB and Russian SVR (their CIA equivalent) highly classified information in exchange for $1.4 million in cash, diamonds, and other goods. Hanssen began his betrayal in 1985 and was not apprehended until 2001, almost as long as the 17 years it took the FBI to catch “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski. The actual span may be longer, since in some accounts, Hanssen had been caught spying for the Soviets in 1976, just three years after he joined the FBI.

The FBI failed to prevent the massive attack of 9/11 and Islamic terrorist attacks at Fort Hood (2009), the Boston Marathon (2013), San Bernardino (2015), and Orlando (2016), all with massive loss of life, and the bureau played no role in the takedown of the terrorists. In 2016, the FBI was a key player in the Russia hoax against candidate and President Trump. Angelo Codevilla knew what to do about it.

“Abolish FISA, Reform FBI, and Break Up CIA,” he wrote in 2020, a year before his death. If the Trump administration fails to follow that advice, the deep state and America’s enemies stand to win in the long run. As inspector Claude Lebel (Michael Londsdale) told Madame de Montpellier (Delphine Seyrig) in The Day of the Jackal, “be in no doubt as to the seriousness of your position.”