Aldrich Ames died in prison this month, ending the life of a man who helped inflict one of the most catastrophic intelligence collapses in American history. A CIA counterintelligence officer with deep access to sensitive operations, Ames sold U.S. secrets to the Soviets for years—names, methods, sources, and ongoing operations—while living far beyond his means and daring his agency to notice. In 1994, he was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life without parole. He never saw freedom again. He died behind bars, exactly where a traitor belongs.

Ames didn’t work alone in destroying national security. While Ames was gutting the CIA from the inside, Robert Hanssen was doing the same to the FBI. These two men—each betraying the nation in parallel, each unknown to the other—contributed to the loss of nearly every American asset inside the Soviet Union in 1984 and 1985, the height of the Cold War. Hanssen’s espionage went beyond selling secrets; he helped cripple America’s ability to catch spies at all. He exposed nuclear warfare secrets, continuity-of-government plans, identities of U.S. sources in Russia, compromised undercover operations and operatives, and most devastatingly, corroded the FBI’s counterintelligence capacity from the inside out. Ames blew holes in our intelligence. Hanssen helped teach the enemy exactly where to aim.

And here’s the part that still sticks with me: Hanssen didn’t respect Ames. Not even a little.

I had many conversations with Robert Hanssen. Some were professional: the overt work we both did to analyze and redesign cybersecurity for the FBI. Others were covert: careful questions phrased to sound harmless, designed to earn his trust while quietly searching for the smoking gun in the most sensitive counterintelligence investigation in the Bureau’s history. And some conversations were simply what happens when two men are locked in a secure room for eight to ten hours a day, trying to stay human.

One conversation fell into all three categories.

Hanssen was a devout Catholic and a committed member of Opus Dei. He went to Mass daily. Most mornings, he attended early services at his parish near his home in Vienna, Virginia. But on days he ran late—family chaos, oversleeping, or any of the reasons we use to justify missing what matters—he headed instead to the noon Mass at the Catholic Information Center, only a few blocks from FBI Headquarters.

To build trust with him, I went along.

I’d bundle up against the January cold and walk beside him through downtown Washington. Those short trips became some of my most operationally useful moments with Hanssen. When you’re walking shoulder to shoulder, outside a secure room, people tend to talk more freely. Especially people who love to hear themselves talk.

One Wednesday, as we stepped off FBIHQ and turned from 9th Street toward the wide lanes of Pennsylvania Avenue, I took a risk—one of those questions that straddled the line between casual conversation and undercover probing.

“Hey, boss,” I said as we paused at the curb, waiting for the signal. “What do you think of Aldrich Ames?”

The question wasn’t out of bounds. Ames had eviscerated American security from inside the CIA, and Hanssen knew more about Russian espionage than anyone I’d ever met. Of course he’d have an opinion. Ames was his closest contemporary in the pantheon of American traitors.

Hanssen stopped and stared at me.

For a moment, I thought I’d pushed too far—tripped the wire between suspicion and paranoia that everyone in special operations learns to respect. Then his mouth curled into a thin, sarcastic smile.

“Ames,” he scoffed. “Aldrich Ames was a moron. A reprobate. A drunk. A loser.”

The walk signal flashed. We moved into the crosswalk, cutting across 9th Street toward Pennsylvania.

“Ames couldn’t stop putting drugs up his nose,” Hanssen continued. “No operational security. Spendthrift. The man couldn’t resist buying whatever he and his wife wanted.”

“Is that how he was caught?” I asked, even though I already knew.

Of course I knew. I joined the FBI as the Ames investigation was concluding. I’d worked around the agents who chased him, along with fellow spies Earl Pitts and Jim Nicholson.

But I never let Hanssen see the depth of my counterintelligence background. As far as he knew, I was a counterterrorism specialist—useful, smart, but out of my depth—helping him build counterintelligence into FBI cybersecurity. The mentor-mentee dynamic was effective. Hanssen liked being the expert in the room. And when he felt like the expert, he talked.

Including, apparently, trash-talking Aldrich Ames.

“They eventually caught Ames because he was sloppy,” Hanssen said, shaking his head. “But they should’ve caught him far earlier.”

His shoulder bumped into mine. I braced and pushed back. He did that constantly—drifting into me as we walked, sometimes steering me into walls. I still don’t know if it was his gimpy left leg, a deliberate power move, or just something he found amusing.

Whatever the reason, he never apologized. Not once.

“Did you know Ames passed every polygraph they gave him?” Hanssen said, eyebrows raised. “Fooled the examiners—even showing up drunk, with a house paid for in cash, a Jaguar paid for in cash, fur coats for his wife…”

He scoffed.

“And they wonder why we find all the spies in the CIA.”

“So you don’t think much of Ames?” I asked, unable to resist. “I mean… he was the most damaging spy in U.S. history.”

Hanssen stopped short and turned on me.

His face hardened—so rigid it looked carved from stone.

“Aldrich Ames was a failure in every way,” he said. “He let greed and pride drive his basest instincts. A coward. A failure.”

Then he jabbed a finger into my chest.

“Do you know what he said when the CIA finally called in the FBI and the joint task force investigated him?”

I stepped back slightly, reclaiming space, and met his eyes—my boss, my mentor, and the man I would soon learn was America’s most devastating spy.

“What did he say?”

Hanssen lifted his hands and flapped them theatrically, mimicking panic.

“You’re making a big mistake!” he whined, voice rising into a mock, theatrical pitch. “You must have the wrong man!”

He dropped his hands and sneered.

“Coward to the last.”

Then the mask slid back into place. The familiar cold gaze. The exhaustion underneath.

“Let’s go,” he said. “We’re going to be late.”

I remembered that conversation the moment I heard Hanssen had been arrested—and what he said when FBI agents closed in on him near his home on Talisman Lane.

Given what he thought of Ames, I’ve always wondered whether Hanssen rehearsed his own arrest—whether he planned his words the way other men plan their last prayer.

I don’t have to wonder.

After all the time I spent with him, I knew his narcissism wouldn’t allow anything less than a carefully staged exit.

“The guns are not necessary,” he said calmly as agents surrounded him from all angles, weapons drawn.

And then, with that slight, familiar smirk—the one I’d seen in countless conversations.

“What took you so long.”

Most people treat their smartphone like a private vault.

Attackers treat it like a shopping mall with the doors unlocked.

The biggest cybersecurity risk on your phone is a basic account takeover exploiting weak passwords, reused passwords, no two-factor authentication, and cloud backups that quietly sync your life into a single point of failure.

Back in 2014, a brute-force style attack helped expose nude photos of dozens of celebrities, and people reportedly sold “sneak peeks” online for Bitcoin. It was sensational and ugly—but it was also a stark warning.

Fast forward to now: this same playbook has evolved into a booming criminal business model: extortion. Hackers break into poorly protected phones, emails, and cloud accounts, then search for anything embarrassing or valuable: intimate photos, private messages, financial documents, even personal secrets. If they find it, they weaponize it.

So here’s the play: lock down your accounts.

And the simplest rule of all: NEVER use a smartphone—or any connected device—to take images you wouldn’t want made public. Don’t text them either. You lose control instantly. If you must take them, stick to polaroids.

TikTok is inching toward a deal that would place its U.S. operations under American ownership—or at least American supervision. The newest developments focus on the easiest national security fix: where U.S. user data is stored. TikTok claims American user data will remain in the U.S., housed in Oracle Cloud, under a privacy and cybersecurity program audited by third-party experts.

That’s the good news.

But here’s my concern: data storage was never the hardest part of the TikTok problem. The real issue has always been the algorithm.

TikTok’s recommendation engine is the reason the app is so addictive, so effective, and so powerful. Critics (including me) argue it pushes harmful content, especially to teenagers and kids. And from a national security standpoint, the fear isn’t just “China might see your data.” The fear is China could influence what Americans see—shaping narratives, suppressing stories, or amplifying propaganda and disinformation.

The 2024 law prohibits ByteDance “cooperation” with the U.S. TikTok entity on operating the algorithm. So the biggest question is simple:

Does the U.S. entity truly own and control the algorithm—or is it still dependent on ByteDance through licensing or coordination?

If ByteDance still has a hand on the steering wheel—even indirectly—then we haven’t removed the national security risk. We’ve just repackaged it.

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