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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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"A series of disconcerting questions nibbles at hearts of troubled youths. These same unanswered questions, along with their acerbic toxins, reveal their pungent fumes more frequently and with greater intensity as a person rushes headfirst into life's concrete jungle."
"No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?"
"Did you hear that? I didn't hear anything. Put that question another way."
"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 like to think that I have no single view nor any single situation that I think things arrive from. I try to give examples of what I think are interesting questions for me."
"I guess the one question I will not get today is: When are you going to do anything about cellular?"
Explore more quotes by Aldrich Ames
"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?"
"Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people."
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