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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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Aldrich Ames
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: May 26
Mole
Spy
River Falls
Wisconsin
Rick Ames
Aldrich Hazen Ames
Human
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More quotes by 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.
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.
Aldrich Ames
The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.
Aldrich Ames
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
Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.
Aldrich Ames
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
Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.
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.
Aldrich Ames
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Aldrich Ames
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
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
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
The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.
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.
Aldrich Ames
No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me.
Aldrich Ames
