 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results. |
| 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. |
| I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union. |
| 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 States was significantly harmed. |
| 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. |
| 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 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. |
| 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. |
| No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me. |
| 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. |
| Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low. |
| 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 difficulties of conducting espionage against the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union were such that historically the Agency had backed away from the task. |
| 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. |
| Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task. |
| The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes. |
