Politics & Power Quote by Aldrich Ames

Aldrich Ames tries to launder betrayal into bureaucratic doubt. The line is built to sound like a conscientious insider slowly waking up: “by the late ’70s” suggests a long moral arc, “question the value” signals principled skepticism, and “a great deal of what we were doing” spreads culpability across an institution. It’s the vocabulary of the responsible dissenter, not the man who sold names to the KGB and helped get people killed.

The intent is defensive and preemptive. By framing his turning point as intellectual - “in terms of the intelligence agency’s impact on American policy” - he shifts the story from greed to critique, from treason to a kind of policy seminar. That last clause is doing heavy lifting: it moves the argument away from operational harm (assets burned, lives lost) and toward an abstract question of efficacy. If the CIA’s “impact” is questionable, the implication goes, maybe undermining it wasn’t purely self-interest. The passive, managerial tone is a shield.

Context matters. The late 1970s were when American intelligence was publicly bruised and politically constrained: post-Vietnam cynicism, Watergate hangover, Church Committee revelations, the new emphasis on oversight. Ames is borrowing the era’s ambient disillusionment as an alibi. The subtext is a subtle plea for moral equivalence: if the system is flawed, the individual transgressor becomes less monstrous, more “complicated.”

It works rhetorically because it mimics the cadence of institutional self-critique - the kind you’d expect from a reflective civil servant. From Ames, it reads like a cover story written in the language of governance.