BENEDICT AMES. How does Aldrich Ames -- who betrayed a dozen secret agents in exchange for $2 million from Moscow -- compare with Benedict Arnold? CIA Director James Woolsey addressed that question last week:
[Each], following a second marriage, began to live beyond his means, resentful at having once been passed over for promotion. In the closing years of a long war, [each] began to correspond with the enemy. But even though Benedict Arnold was also unmasked as a traitor for his attempt to surrender the key fortress of West Point to the British general and even though he also received a large payment -- thousands of pounds sterling and substantial property in Canada -- there are some important differences between him and Ames. And they are all in Benedict Arnold's favor.
Benedict Arnold had earlier fought bravely for the United States at the Battle of Saratoga. Benedict Arnold did not send any American agents to their deaths .... The man whose name has been synonymous with treason in this country for over two centuries was a far more modest traitor than Ames.
Ames was and is a malignant betrayer of his country who killed a number of people who helped the United States and the West win the cold war. He killed them just as surely as if he pulled the trigger of a revolver put to their heads in the basement of the Lubyanka prison, the classic method of KGB execution. They -- our agents in the cold war against the Soviet Union -- risked their lives, helped keep you free and died because this warped, murdering traitor wanted a bigger house and a Jaguar.
