I was going to take the day off from writing today, when I suddenly realized why the date sounded familiar.

Unless it was your birthday, wedding anniversary, or the birth date of your first-born child, you probably wouldn’t have the slightest idea where you were on February 21, 1994. But I remember it clearly.

I was in Moscow — the one in Russia, not Idaho USA — staying in the apartment/office where I had lived and worked the previous summer. Back from a full day of meetings and a bit of shopping, I was settling down for the evening, and tuned in to the news on the apartment’s satellite TV.

Only half listening, I suddenly heard a news flash about an American who had been arrested in a Washington, D.C. suburb on charges of spying for Russia. That man was Aldrich Ames, and he was said to work for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This was not good news.

But, I thought, it wasn’t all that surprising. The spy games of the Cold War had never really ceased. And who was this Ames guy, anyway? Probably just some low-level pencil-pusher . . . right? Nothing to do with me.

How wrong can you be?!!

It’s true that I had never met Ames . . . didn’t even know he existed before that news broadcast. But life is funny, for many reasons, one of them being this phenomenon known as the domino effect. Also sometimes referred to as “shit flows downstream.”

There is also a theory called “degrees of separation,” which posits that any one of us can trace our relationship to any other human being on Earth through no more than six degrees of separation. For example, if I have a friend whose nanny is the cousin of one of the British royal family’s nannies, then I’m only four or five degrees away from being connected to King Charles III.

Do you see where I’m going here? And in Washington, D.C., where everyone is somehow related to everyone else anyway . . . well, it’s easy to find yourself in the midst of a major shitstorm without having done anything wrong.

*. *. *

I have written at length, in this very blog, about my experiences in 1993-95 with the FBI, the CIA, the KGB, and a couple of high-level Russian defectors; there’s no need to go into the whole long, convoluted story again. Suffice it to say, that TV news flash — which didn’t seem to mean much to me at the time — eventually wove its way into my life.

It turned out that I was the person sitting way downstream when the shit began to flow.

*. *. *

Aldrich Ames was convicted of espionage and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Now 83 years old, he still sits in the Federal Correctional Institution at Terre Haute, Indiana, presumably just waiting to die. It’s where he belongs, having been responsible for the betrayal and deaths — executions, really — of an estimated 30 CIA assets between 1985 and 1994.

As for me . . . well, I’m still here, free as a bird, savoring my memories of those years of travel and adventure. I may have been at the bottom of the poop pile 31 years ago; but in the long run, I believe I got the better end of the deal.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
2/21/25