 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. |
| Perhaps my information hurt the Soviet Union more than it helped. I have no idea. It was not something I ever discussed with the KGB officers that I was dealing with. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people. |
| 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. |
| The national security state has many unfair and cruel weapons in its arsenal, but that of junk science is one which can be fought and perhaps defeated. |
| Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies. |
| The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent. |
| We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap. |
| My little scam in April '85 went like this: Give me $50,000; here's some names of some people we've recruited. |
| The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo. |
| 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? |
| I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution and capital punishment. |
| I'm a traitor, but I don't consider myself a traitor. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
