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.

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.

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.

The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.

I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution and capital punishment.

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

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.