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"The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent."
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"Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are."
"All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value."
"The American invasion did not succeed in Vietnam, and will never succeed in Iraq."
"The only difference between the Bel Air of the '90s and the Bel Air of my childhood is that now the nannies are Latina instead of British, and the cars European instead of American."
"American shows don't always translate, but this one has and speaking for myself I'm quite glad for it."
"An Englishmen thinks seated; a Frenchmen standing; an American pacing, an Irishman, afterwards."
"American teachers have one indisputable advantage over foreign ones; they understand the American temperament and can judge its unevenness, its lights and its shadows."
Explore more quotes by Aldrich Ames
"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."
"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."
"Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies."
"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."
"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."
"We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap."
"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."
"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."
"When I got the money, the whole burden descended on me, and the realization of what I had done. And it led me then to make the further step, a change of loyalties."
"Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union."
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