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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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Aldrich Ames
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: May 26
Mole
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River Falls
Wisconsin
Rick Ames
Aldrich Hazen Ames
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More quotes by Aldrich Ames

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I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.
Aldrich Ames
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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.
Aldrich Ames
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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.
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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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.
Aldrich Ames
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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.
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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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
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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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I'm a traitor, but I don't consider myself a traitor.
Aldrich Ames
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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
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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 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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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.
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
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The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.
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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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.
Aldrich Ames
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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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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