th.The CIA has had problems with double agents. A double agent is an agent who is actually working for a foreign power, usually feeding false information to his case officer.7 In 1990, a CIA team went to Berlin to go through the records of the Stasi, the former East German intelligence service. CIA officers discovered that all but a few of the Stasi's East German agents had been recruited as double agents by the Communist regime in East Berlin. In 1988, a Cuban named Felix Aspillaga told the Operations Directorate that almost every one of the agents that the CIA had recruited in Cuba was actually working for the Cubans and giving wrong information to the Americans.One of the more recent cases of a double agent deals with Aldrich Ames. Ames was a spy for the CIA. He had a normal income and it seemed that he lived a normal life. It looked this way from the outside, but on the inside he was really working for the Soviet KGB. He was paid a total of $1.5 million by the Soviets, for his service. He deposited some of the money in his name and some if the money in his wife's name in banks in Virginia. He sold U.S. secrets to the KGB. He also gave them the names of all of the Soviets that the CIA hired as spies of its own. His actions started in the mid 80's and he worked undetected for nine years. He and his wife were finally arrested in the spring of 1994. If convicted they would both spend life in prison.The agency has had other problems and scandals too. In 1960 a Soviet missile shot down a U.S. spy plane that was taking photos of Soviet territory. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev then canceled a summit meeting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. During the Vietnam War, the CIA illegally spied on thousands of Americans who opposed the war. They did this by opening mail and using wiretaps and other illegal methods to get information.4 Investigations in the mid-1970's found that several CIA employees took part in the Waterga...
