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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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Aldrich Ames
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: May 26
Mole
Spy
River Falls
Wisconsin
Rick Ames
Aldrich Hazen Ames
Away
Difficulties
Soviet
Agency
Union
Task
Espionage
Unions
Backed
Tasks
Conducting
Difficulty
Historically

More quotes by Aldrich Ames

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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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The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.
Aldrich Ames
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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
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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
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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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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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Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.
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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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
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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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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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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 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
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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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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.
Aldrich Ames
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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.
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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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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I'm a traitor, but I don't consider myself a traitor.
Aldrich Ames
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I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.
Aldrich Ames