Quotation by

Aldrich Ames

In my professional work with the Agency, by the late '70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy.

Advertisement

Understanding this quote AI Analysis

By the late 1970s, Aldrich Ames began doubting how much the intelligence agency's efforts actually influenced U.S. government decisions.

More by this author

All quotes by Aldrich Ames →

More quotes about Intelligence

See all →
I wasn't privy to all of the intelligence that was coming in about Guatemala, but I did see the traffic that was coming in from Guatemala City, because it was very relevant to me, and of course I exc…
Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.
We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap.

Advertisement

The resistance of policy-makers to intelligence is not just founded on an ideological presupposition. They distrust intelligence sources and intelligence officials because they don't understand what …
There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results.
Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.