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

The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.
Aldrich Ames

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one’s interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me.
Aldrich Ames

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

Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.
Aldrich Ames

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

In my professional work with the Agency, by the late ’70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency’s impact on American policy.
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

Foreign Ministry guys don’t become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.
Aldrich Ames

Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.
Aldrich Ames

There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results.
Aldrich Ames