Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Aldrich Ames
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: May 26
Mole
Spy
River Falls
Wisconsin
Rick Ames
Aldrich Hazen Ames
Ideas
Dealing
Ever
Helped
Something
Union
Unions
Perhaps
Information
Discussed
Hurt
Officers
Idea
Soviet

More quotes by Aldrich Ames

Image
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
Image
The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.
Aldrich Ames
Image
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
Image
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.
Aldrich Ames
Image
The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.
Aldrich Ames
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.
Aldrich Ames
Image
I'm a traitor, but I don't consider myself a traitor.
Aldrich Ames
Image
No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me.
Aldrich Ames
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.
Aldrich Ames
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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