Aldrich Ames Quotes on age

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... view

By: Aldrich Ames

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent... view

By: 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... view

By: 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... view

By: 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... view

By: Aldrich Ames

When I handed over the names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union, I had come to the conclusion that the loss of these sources to the U.S. would not compromise significant national defense, political, diplomatic interests... view

By: 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... view

By: Aldrich Ames

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

By: Aldrich Ames

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... view

By: Aldrich Ames

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... view

By: 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... view

By: 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... view

By: Aldrich Ames

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

By: Aldrich Ames

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... view

By: Aldrich Ames

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... view

By: Aldrich Ames

I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union... view

By: 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... view

By: Aldrich Ames

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... view

By: 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... view

By: 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.. view

By: Aldrich Ames