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 betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.

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?

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.

Let's say a Soviet exchange student back in the '70s would go back and tell the KGB about people and places and things that he'd seen and done and been involved with. This is not really espionage; there's no betrayal of trust.

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

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.