Aldrich Ames Quotes

The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information. It puts people's lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems.

I do not want to respond to leaks that concern things that have to do with state secrets of the first degree.

Hillary Clinton exposed our nation's most sensitive national security secrets to foreign adversaries.

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing.

The consequences of leaking sensitive information is that Americans and coalition forces die, and we lose trust with foreign spies, and our national security is put at risk.

Leaking of classified material is a concern.

Why are diplomatic cables secret at all?

But the technology was accessible, which suggests incompetence on the part of our counterintelligence community and the Clinton Administration, and may in fact rise to the level of treason.

What good does it do to spend millions to protect ourselves against espionage if our secrets just leak away.

I had never seen a trace of a threat to the national security from the publication.

We should be adult enough to understand that major countries are going to be spying on us.

When a foreign adversary knows that an American official has deceived or withheld vital information from our government, it creates a fundamental counterintelligence vulnerability that can render that official irreparably compromised.

I'm dealing with Mexico, I'm dealing with Argentina. We were dealing in this case with Mike Flynn. All this information gets put into The Washington Post and The New York Times, and I'm saying, what's going to happen when I'm dealing on the Middle East? We've got to stop it. That's why it's a criminal penalty.

In most cases, cables are marked secret not because the U.S. requires it but because those speaking to us - the foreign leaders across the table - do. They are not keeping secrets from us, but from two other groups: their enemies and their subjects.

In terms of the espionage, this is something I have talked to President Obama about. We don't want it to mar the relationship between Mexico and the United States. But it is unacceptable for a country to practice such espionage, especially if there is a good relationship with the other country.

Penetrating a company's security often starts with the bad guy obtaining some piece of information that seems so innocent, so everyday and unimportant, that most people in the organization don't see any reason why the item should be protected and restricted.

You can't get closer to the heart of national sovereignty than national security and intelligence services.

I think all governments engage in intelligence gathering vis-a-vis other governments.

Edward Snowden may not be a Chinese mole, but he might as well be. He's just handed Beijing a major score, while the NSA struggles to pick up the pieces - and the rest of us pay the price in terms of future national security.

Malicious attacks on the Soviet Union produce a natural feeling of indignation.

The United States, like any great power, is always going to have an intelligence operation, and some electronic surveillance is obligatory in the modern world.

I will not, nor will I ever, publicly divulge sensitive intelligence sources and methods. For when that happens, our national security is endangered and lives can be lost.

Like any good spy novel, the Cox Report alleges that Chinese spies penetrated four U.S. weapons research labs and stole important information on seven nuclear warhead designs.

…the CIA has never carried out any action of a political nature, given any support of any nature, to any persons, potentates or movements, political or otherwise, without appropriate approval at a high potential level in our government outside the CIA.

It is incontestable that even under the best of circumstances and when dealing with the friendliest and most stable of allies that intelligence organizations of foreign powers must not be permitted to become established on American soil and should be discouraged wherever possible from taking root any place in this Hemisphere.