Aldrich Ames

Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.

Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.

Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.

Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.

An espionage organization is a collector: it collects raw information. That gets processed by a machinery that is supposed to read more

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.

I could have stopped it after they paid me the $50,000. I wouldn't even have had to go on to read more

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.

Espionage, for the most part, involves finding a person who knows something or has something that you can induce them read more

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.