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"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."
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Exlpore more Difficulty quotes
"It's not so easy... it's not possible."
"You can put in all the difficulties, jumps, runs, and any other devilish complexities you like, except octave spans and similar features which do not suit the formation of hands."
"The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form - the one of the particles, the other of the waves - are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases."
"I've always had difficulties with female characters."
"It does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way."
"What parent has it easy? I just never make the difficulty of it an obstacle. I just do it."
"I should point out, however, that at first some difficulty was experienced in observing the phenomena predicted by the theory, owing to the extreme smallness of the variations in the period of oscillation."
"When things go right it's hard to figure out why, but when things go wrong it's really easy."
"My task is becoming more and more delicate, while the difficulties increase constantly."
"Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping."
Explore more quotes by 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 desperation."
"Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union."
"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."
"When Reagan was elected, I felt that the Agency had gone much more into the service of a political tendency in the country with which I had already felt very strong disagreement."
"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."
"Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies."
"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."
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