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 Quote

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

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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

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 Quote

The national security state has many unfair and cruel weapons in its arsenal, but that of junk science is one which can be fought and perhaps defeated.
- Aldrich Ames Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 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 Quote

We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap.
- Aldrich Ames Quote

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.
- Aldrich Ames 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 Quote