Politics & Power Quote by Aldrich Ames

“I came into the Agency” is doing quiet reputational triage. Ames opens by locating himself inside an institution and an era, not inside a moral failing. The phrase “a set of ideas and attitudes” makes belief sound like luggage you picked up at the airport: impersonal, almost accidental. That’s the first move in a classic self-exculpation script - take the sharp edges off agency by turning choices into atmosphere.

Then he offers the label: “liberal anti-communism.” It’s a term with mid-century respectability baked in, the posture of Cold War professionals who could dislike Soviet power without embracing reactionary paranoia. Dropping it here isn’t ideological autobiography so much as character staging. Ames is telling you he was normal, credentialed, properly calibrated. If he later became the most damaging CIA mole of his generation, that rupture can be framed as disillusionment, corruption, or inevitability - anything but an innate rot.

The subtext is also a subtle appeal to the listener’s nostalgia for consensus. “Typical…at that time” invites you to hear the old, reassuring hum of establishment purpose, when the world was supposedly legible and the enemy was clearly marked. Coming from a criminal, it’s an attempt to borrow legitimacy from the uniform he once wore.

Context sharpens the cynicism: Ames didn’t merely “drift” from a shared Cold War mindset; he sold secrets for money and facilitated deaths. The calm, sociological phrasing is the point. It’s not confession. It’s narrative control - laundering betrayal through the language of biography.