Aldrich Ames Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Betrayal, Giving, Espionage

  87 Copy quote

• The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.

  Aldrich Ames

  Betrayal, Heavy, Taboo

  86 Copy quote

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

  Aldrich Ames

  Traitor

  8 Copy 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

  Long, United States, Unions

  7 Copy 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

  Agency, America, People

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Organization, Reliability, Information

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Might, Criminals

  8 Copy quote

• The resistance of policy-makers to intelligence is not just founded on an ideological presupposition. They distrust intelligence sources and intelligence officials because they don't understand what the real problems are.

  Aldrich Ames

  Real, Resistance, Problem

  52 Copy quote

• 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

  Names, People, Giving

  7 Copy 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

  Trouble, Polygraph, Knows

  84 Copy quote

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

  Aldrich Ames

  Cia Agents, Names, Unions

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Law, Punishment, Names

  17 Copy 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

  Running, Kgb, People

  78 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Anxiety, Consistency

  8 Copy quote

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

  Aldrich Ames

  Tasks, Credit, Uncertain

  Letter from his cell at the Allenwood Federal Penitentiary to Stephen Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, November 2000; cited on the FAS website. Ames, you see, was not at fault; it was those who trusted him.

  7 Copy quote

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

  Aldrich Ames

  Effort, Spy, Pertinent

  52 Copy 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

  Betrayal, Trust No One, Kgb

  90 Copy quote

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

  Aldrich Ames

  Knowing, Arms, Might

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Late, Cia, Term

  21 Copy 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

  Weapons, Junk, Defeated

  8 Copy 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

  Europe, Gdp, Invasion

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  8 Copy 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

  Agency, Tasks, Unions

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Hurt, Ideas, Kgb

  78 Copy quote

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

  Aldrich Ames

  Mistake, Confusion, Use

  85 Copy 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

  Play, Victory, Roles

  7 Copy quote

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