He caused ten CIA agents - Soviet intelligence officers working for the United States - to be executed. He betrayed countless other CIA agents, condemning them to harsh prison sentences in the Soviet gulag. He sold dozens, perhaps as many as hundreds, of CIA operations to the KGB. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency compared him - unfavorably - to Benedict Arnold.

He was Moscow's mole inside the CIA for almost nine years. The KGB thought him so valuable that it paid him $2.7 million and promised him $1.9 million more - a total of $4.6 million. He was the highest paid spy in the history of the world. His FBI code name was NIGHTMOVER. His name was Aldrich Ames. Now, David Wise tells the inside story of the most damaging spy since the creation of the CIA in 1947 at the start of the cold war.

Only David Wise, America's most acclaimed espionage authority, could take the reader this deep inside the CIA and the FBI. Only Wise could show how Aldrich Ames got away with high treason for so long and how the CIA's worst nightmare was allowed to come true.