Aldrich Ames Quotes

We knew we were talking about spies. I knew he knew I knew. I was digging my own grave.

Female spies typically represented one of two extremes: the seductress who employed her wiles to manipulate men, and the cross-dresser who blended in by impersonating them.

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.

There is only one law of espionage—there are always going to be spies.

Foreign intelligence services rely on manipulating vulnerabilities over time - like greed, or fear of exposure of a secret - to puppeteer those under their influence into acting in their interests without saying a word.

No one demands more caution than a spy, and when someone has the skeleton key to minds, counter him by leaving the key of caution inside, on the other side of the keyhole.

You couldn't trust anyone or anything that belonged to the world of espionage.

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

I am always up to steal secrets from smart people.

However I dress it up, I was a spy and I am not proud of it.

Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

Who would have thought that in the 1950s, Burbank was a hotbed of international espionage?

I'm sort of fascinated by the whole espionage crime thing.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.

Utilize undercover officers to distribute misinformation within the crowds

An intelligence service is the ideal vehicle for a conspiracy [against its own government]. Its members can travel about at home and abroad under secret orders, and no questions are asked. Every scrap of paper in the files, its membership, its expenditure of funds, its contacts, even enemy contacts, are state secrets.

This town leaks like a sieve. Sometimes I think that the easiest thing on the world would be to be a spy against the United States of America

I had been given some training in my past CIA career to do just this sort of thing ... floating forged newspaper accounts, telegrams, that sort of thing.

What the Hell do those clowns do out there at Langley? Get the CIA jerks working on Cambodia.

If you’re going to be involved with espionage, you’ve got to be motivated. It’s not fun and games. It’s dirty and dangerous. There’s always the chance that you’re going to get burned.

Spies go undercover. They take on different personas.

It's a very dangerous and lonely thing, I imagine, to be a spy: to have friendships that are deceptions, that are not honest.

Oh, I can keep many secrets, so I would be a phenomenal secret agent. I love secrets.

The CIA in real life, we know, is looking for new kinds of cover. It's looking for new platforms, as they like to say, and it's trying to use the revolution in communications technology, the ability to use all sorts of corporate entities in ways that are hard to detect to get our spies in the places where they need to be.

One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.