I found that our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.

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.

My little scam in April '85 went like this: Give me $50,000; here's some names of some people we've recruited.

The U.S. is, so far as I know, the only nation which places such extensive reliance on the polygraph. It has gotten us into a lot of trouble.

I'm a traitor, but I don't consider myself a traitor.

Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low.

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.