Aldrich Ames Quotes

I’m a traitor, but I don’t consider myself a traitor.

I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.

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. You could call it liberal anti-communism.

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.

I could have stopped it after they paid me the $50,000. I wouldn’t even have had to go on to do more than I already had: just the double agents’ names that I gave.

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.

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. That almost always involves a betrayal of trust.

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.

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.

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.

The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.