Spies get blown all the time (and in Bond's case, that's both literal and figurative). Some are uncovered through careful research by an enemy agency, some are betrayed by defectors and some simply die and are discovered after the fact. Others wake up in the morning, stick their foot in a bucket and pratfall their way through espionage until they accidentally trip and somersault into prison.

6 Aldrich Ames

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If Aldrich Ames ever got his own Bond flick, it would be called The Spy Who Loved Whiskey. He was frequently reprimanded for sleeping on the job at the CIA, a gig he almost didn't get because of his -- no shit -- repeated drunken brawls with police officers. That's right: Getting hammered and taking a few flying jump-kicks at a cop does not disqualify you from intelligence work. Ames was also chastised for having three extramarital affairs, which doesn't sound like any of the CIA's business ... until you realize that one of them was with a Colombian agent. But somehow, despite (or hell -- possibly because of) his sloppy cop fights and spy-banging, the CIA promoted him to the elite Soviet team in D.C. Hey, if this whole "subtlety" thing wasn't working out for the spy game, why not throw a crack squad of stumbling boozehounds at the USSR? You know: Fight firewater with firewater.

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And, apparently, spray tan with spray tan.

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But astonishingly, the drunk guy with a track record of thinking with his dick didn't turn out to be a good choice to handle sensitive information. Ames contacted the Soviets in 1985 and turned traitor for money, which he handled with the usual stealthy grace we've come to expect from him. Instead of setting up a series of drops (standard practice for the spy community), Ames would just drive down to the Soviet Embassy, walk in with a box full of documents, have lunch with his contact, take his 50 grand and then walk right out the front door with the cash, presumably in a bag with a giant dollar sign on it.

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And he kept this up for nine years.

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Yelling on the way out, "Thank you for the money you just gave me for all that spying!"

The CIA finally caught on to Ames when somebody began to wonder why the guy snoring on his desk and using a bottle of Scotch for a pillow was driving to the office in a brand new Jaguar. Ames was being paid about $60,000 a year at the time, yet somehow managed to drop $540,000 for a house -- in cash! When they looked into his finances, the CIA found that even Ames' monthly phone bills exceeded $6,000. And when they finally did the math and figured out that donating plasma and recycling beer cans just doesn't pay that well, Ames suddenly left to attend a "conference" in Moscow in early 1994. But he didn't make it in time, and the agency moved on him. Now he's spending the rest of his life in prison, but only after making $4.6 million from selling CIA secrets.