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

Espionage, for the most part, involves finding a person who knows something or has something that you can induce them secretly to give to you. That almost always involves a betrayal of trust.

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.

The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.

I said in court a long time ago that I didn't see that the Soviet Union was significantly helped by the information I gave them, nor that the United States was significantly harmed.

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.