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 a…

- 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…

- Aldrich Ames

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

- 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.

- Aldrich Ames

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

The resistance of policy-makers to intelligence is not just founded on an ideological presupposition. They distrust intelligence sources and intellig…

- 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 despe…

- Aldrich Ames

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 …

- 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 process…

- Aldrich Ames