On February 21, 1994, Aldrich H. Ames and his wife, Rosario, were arrested outside their home in Alexandria, Virginia, by the FBI. It was the end of the largest spy hunt in history and the beginning of one of the worst disasters ever to hit the CIA. As the investigators soon learned, never before had one man done so much damage to his country as Aldrich Ames did to U.S. intelligence and security during his nine years of spying for the Russians.

Sellout by James Adams, the Washington bureau chief of the London Sunday Times and a renowned expert on intelligence issues, chronicles the Ames story in gripping, page-turning detail.

Sellout is the story of a man destined for failure. Rick Ames entered the Agency at age twenty-three and soon distinguished himself for his lack of ability: he couldn't recruit sources, left top-secret papers on the subway, and as the years went by, was more often drunk on the job than not. Yet he survived and even flourished within the CIA.