Before Sandra Grimes became a mole hunter, she'd been ready to scale back. "I was not old enough at the time to retire," Grimes said in an interview for the National Security Archive at George Washington University, "but I was satisfied professionally. I had a family that I wanted to spend more time with."

It was 1991. Sandra Grimes had spent more than two decades with the CIA. But she agreed to stay on to help a colleague investigate why the agency's informants in the Soviet Union had "gone dark," as they say in spycraft, in 1985 and 1986. They learned they had been identified, interrogated, and often executed.

"It was a terrible, terrible reminder of the seriousness of what we did for a living," Sandra Grimes said in that National Security Archive interview. "We owed all these people w

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