Aldrich Ames quotes

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 present a finished product. (Aldrich Ames)
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, nor that the United States was significantly harmed. View quote
Aldrich Ames
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 overall charter. View quote
Aldrich Ames
Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task. View quote
Aldrich Ames
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. View quote
Aldrich Ames
To the extent that I considered the personal burden of harming the people who had trusted me, plus the Agency, or the United States, I wasn't processing that. View quote
Aldrich Ames
I'm a traitor, but I don't consider myself a traitor. View quote
Aldrich Ames
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. That almost always involves a betrayal of trust. View quote
Aldrich Ames
The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo. View quote
Aldrich Ames
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 what the real problems are. View quote
Aldrich Ames
I saw a limit to what I was giving as kind of a scam I was running on the KGB, by giving them people that I knew were their double agents fed to us. (Aldrich Ames)
You might as well ask why a middle-aged man with no criminal record might put a paper bag over his head and rob a bank. I acted out of personal desperation. View quote
Aldrich Ames
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 seen and done and been involved with. This is not really espionage; there's no betrayal of trust. View quote
Aldrich Ames
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 and fear is the point. View quote
Aldrich Ames
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 officers that I was dealing with. View quote
Aldrich Ames
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 lot of trouble. View quote
Aldrich Ames
No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me. View quote
Aldrich Ames
The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent. View quote
Aldrich Ames
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 extremely, extremely low. View quote
Aldrich Ames
The difficulties of conducting espionage against the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union were such that historically the Agency had backed away from the task. View quote
Aldrich Ames
My little scam in April '85 went like this: Give me $50,000; here's some names of some people we've recruited. (Aldrich Ames)
I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union. View quote
Aldrich Ames
The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people. View quote
Aldrich Ames
The only thing I ever withheld from the KGB were the names of two agents whom I personally had known and handled and had a particular feeling for. View quote
Aldrich Ames
The national security state has many unfair and cruel weapons in its arsenal, but that of junk science is one which can be fought and perhaps defeated. View quote
Aldrich Ames