The Traitors Among US

Four Decades of American Espionage

In my book, I'm struck by a profound irony: the people in these pages—Walker, Hanssen, Ames, Manning, Snowden, and dozens of others—likely believed they were doing the right thing, at least at first.

John Walker may have believed he was taking advantage of a bureaucratic system that undervalued him. Robert Hanssen may have convinced himself he was playing a game of intellectual one-upmanship with the FBI. Aldrich Ames convinced himself that intelligence work was futile and nobody was really hurt by his betrayals. Chelsea Manning believed she was exposing war crimes. Edward Snowden believed he was defending the Constitution.

Self-justification is powerful. It allows people to commit acts they would normally find unconscionable. It allows them to betray colleagues, country, and cause while maintaining the belief that they're the hero of their own story.

This is why counterintelligence is about more than catching spies—it's about understanding human psychology, motivation, and rationalization. It's about recognizing that ordinary people, given the right combination of circumstances, motivation, and opportunity, can do extraordinary things, both noble and terrible.
The eternal struggle isn't really between security services and spies. It's between our better angels and our worst impulses. It's between loyalty and self-interest, between principle and expedience, between the common good and personal grievance.

That struggle will continue as long as humans have secrets worth keeping and secrets worth revealing. The names and methods will change. The technology will evolve. But the fundamental dynamic—the eternal push and pull between those who hold secrets and those who seek to expose them—will endure.

In the end, perfect security is impossible. But in a free society, it may also be undesirable. The goal is not to eliminate all risk—that would require eliminating freedom itself. The goal is to manage risk while preserving liberty, to protect secrets while enabling oversight, to catch spies while avoiding witch hunts.
It's a balance we haven't perfected yet. Perhaps we never will.

But the effort to strike that balance—the eternal struggle to protect national security without destroying the democratic values that security is meant to protect—may be the most important intelligence work of all.