Quote

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

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
Country
Tendencies
Much
Service
Strength
Already
Disagreement
Gone
Reagan
Strong
Elected
Felt
Tendency
Political
Agency

More quotes by Aldrich Ames

Image
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
Image
Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.
Aldrich Ames
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.
Aldrich Ames
Image
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
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
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
Image
The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.
Aldrich Ames
Image
The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.
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
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 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
No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me.
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
Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.
Aldrich Ames
Image
I'm a traitor, but I don't consider myself a traitor.
Aldrich Ames
Image
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
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
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