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"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."
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"But I was thinking of a way To multiply by ten, And always, in the answer, get The question back again."

"Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died."

"I'm not going to deny it. I'm a neat person, there's no question. But I don't become obsessed with it."

"I think the sea has thrown itself upon me and been answered, at least in part, and I believe I am a little changed - not essentially, but changed and transubstantiated as anyone is who has asked a question and been answered."
Explore more quotes by Aldrich Ames

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

"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."

"The only thing I ever withheld from the KGB were the names of two agents whom I personally had known and handled and had a particular feeling for."

"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."

"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 found that our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union."

"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."

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

"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."
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