Quotes By Aldrich Ames

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

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.

The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.

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.

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.

I'm a traitor, but I don't consider myself a traitor.

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.

My little scam in April '85 went like this: Give me $50,000; here's some names of some people we've recruited.