Let's say a Soviet exchange student back in the '70s would go back and tell the KGB about people and places and things that he'd seen and done and been involved with. This is not really espionage; there's no betrayal of trust.

No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me.

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 the real problems are.

When Reagan was elected, I felt that the Agency had gone much more into the service of a political tendency in the country with which I had already felt very strong disagreement.

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

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.

The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people.