John E. McLaughlin

Well, you've teed me up perfectly for my next question, which of course is like, what the motive would be.

I've been recalling an interview that we had on All Things Considered earlier this year with a man named John McLaughlin, who was the former deputy director of the CIA.

And he was explaining an acronym that the Central Intelligence Agency uses when they are trying to determine motive.

It's MICE.

Those four characteristics are things that we often look at when we're trying to understand spying.

Money, ideology, compromise, and ego.

Okay, John McLaughlin, we were interviewing him on All Things Considered because arguably the most famous traitor in CIA history, a man named Aldrich James, was in the news.

John McLaughlin's view was that Aldrich James' motive was probably money, or at least that was the biggest thing.