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.

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

I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.

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

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.

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.