“In bare outline, the story is this: Sometime apparently in the late 1980s, a Russian intelligence officer named Alexander Zaporozhsky, nicknamed Max, whom the CIA had recruited in an East African country, told his case officer that the Russians had two penetrations of U.S. intelligence, one in the CIA and one in the FBI,” according to Mark Stout, an intelligence historian and a former US intelligence officer, who has read Bauer’s forthcoming book.
“The former would turn out to be Aldrich Ames, and the latter, Robert Hanssen. Max was subsequently able to provide ironclad evidence pointing to Ames, so when, in 1994, Max added that there was actually a second penetration of the CIA, his claim was taken extremely seriously. In fact, a small cadre of mole hunters had already concluded that some of the CIA’s losses in Russia could not be attributed to Ames, Hanssen or Howard.”