Aldrich Ames
Aldrich Ames
Aldrich Hazen Amesis an American CIA analyst, turned KGB mole, who was convicted of espionage against his country in 1994. He is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole in the high-security Allenwood U.S. Penitentiary. Ames was formerly a 31-year CIA counterintelligence officer and analyst who committed espionage against his country by spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. So far as it is known, Ames compromised the second-largest number of CIA agents, second only to Robert Hanssen...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCriminal
Date of Birth26 May 1941
CountryUnited States of America
Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.
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.
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 betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.
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.
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'm a traitor, but I don't consider myself a traitor.
The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people.
The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My little scam in April '85 went like this: Give me $50,000; here's some names of some people we've recruited.