Aldrich Ames Quotes

38 quotes in 596 categories

• Let's say a Soviet exchange student back in the '70s would go back and tell the KGB about people and places and things that he'd…
• I came into the Agency with a set of ideas and attitudes that were quite typical of people coming into the Agency at that time.…
• Because interrogations are intended to coerce confessions, interrogators feel themselves justified in using their coercive means. Consistency regarding the technique is not important; inducing anxiety…
• The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.
• An espionage organization is a collector: it collects raw information. That gets processed by a machinery that is supposed to resolve its reliability, and to…
• By the late '70s I had come to question the point of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the CIA's…
• Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.
• Espionage, for the most part, involves finding a person who knows something or has something that you can induce them secretly to give to you.…
• Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.
• Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was…
• I found that our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.
• I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.
• The resistance of policy-makers to intelligence is not just founded on an ideological presupposition. They distrust intelligence sources and intelligence officials because they don't understand…
• The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.
• I'm a traitor, but I don't consider myself a traitor.
• The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people.
• The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.
• I said in court a long time ago that I didn't see that the Soviet Union was significantly helped by the information I gave them,…
• The U.S. is, so far as I know, the only nation which places such extensive reliance on the polygraph. It has gotten us into a…
• Perhaps my information hurt the Soviet Union more than it helped. I have no idea. It was not something I ever discussed with the KGB…

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