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 difficulties of conducting espionage against the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union were such that historically the Agency had backed away from the task.

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.

Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.

Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.

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