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 Soviet Union did not achieve victory over the West, so was my information inadequate to help them to victory, or did it play no particular role in their failure to achieve victory?

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.

Because interrogations are intended to coerce confessions, interrogators feel themselves justified in using their coercive means. Consistency regarding the technique is not important; inducing anxiety and fear is the point.

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

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

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.