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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.

Aldrich Ames

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Aldrich Ames
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: May 26
Mole
Spy
River Falls
Wisconsin
Rick Ames
Aldrich Hazen Ames
Typical
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Communism
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Ideas
Liberal
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Coming
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More quotes by Aldrich Ames

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I'm a traitor, but I don't consider myself a traitor.
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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.
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The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.
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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.
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When Reagan was elected, I felt that the Agency had gone much more into the service of a political tendency in the country with which I had already felt very strong disagreement.
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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.
Aldrich Ames
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No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me.
Aldrich Ames
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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.
Aldrich Ames
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I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.
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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.
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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.
Aldrich Ames
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The Soviet Union did not achieve victory over the West, so was my information inadequate to help them to victory, or did it play no particular role in their failure to achieve victory?
Aldrich Ames
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Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.
Aldrich Ames
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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.
Aldrich Ames
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The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.
Aldrich Ames
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The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people.
Aldrich Ames
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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.
Aldrich Ames
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I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution and capital punishment.
Aldrich Ames
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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.
Aldrich Ames
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Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.
Aldrich Ames