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.

The U.S. is, so far as I know, the only nation which places such extensive reliance on the polygraph. It has gotten us into a lot of trouble.

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.

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.

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

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.