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

#cia #come #deal #doing #great

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

— Aldrich Ames

#credit #deciding #person #task #trust

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

#always #betrayal #espionage #finding #give

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

— Aldrich Ames

#agents #become #foreign #guys #intelligence

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

#carry #certainly #could #debates #europe

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

#attitudes #call #came #coming #could

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

#agents #already #could #double #even

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

#economic #efforts #espionage #found #had

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

— Aldrich Ames

#cia #compromised #handed #i #many

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

#collects #espionage #finished #finished product #gets