Quote

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

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
Extent
States
People
Plus
Considered
Burden
Harming
Personal
Processing
Wasn
Trusted
United
Agency
America

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
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 handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.
Aldrich Ames
Image
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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 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
The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.
Aldrich Ames
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
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