Politics & Power Quote by Aldrich Ames

Ames is doing something sly here: laundering betrayal into diagnosis. By describing U.S. efforts against the Soviet Union as “virtually never” producing “worthwhile” intelligence, he’s not just offering a critique of tradecraft. He’s writing a moral alibi in bureaucratic ink. If the program was already failing, the leap from loyal officer to paid Soviet mole starts to look, in his telling, less like treason and more like an ugly kind of “realism.”

The line is engineered to sound empirical. Notice the hedges (“virtually,” “very seldom”) that mimic analytic caution, the way intelligence professionals talk when they want to appear rigorous without opening themselves to easy refutation. Then the kicker: “political or economic intelligence.” That framing is strategic. He’s not talking about tactical successes, counterintelligence wins, or the day-to-day value of collection; he’s narrowing the definition of “worthwhile” to the prestige categories that influence policymakers and budgets. It’s a subtle downgrade of an entire enterprise, implying that the West’s picture of the USSR was always blurry, always second-rate.

Context matters: this is the voice of a man caught between confession and spin, shaped by the Cold War’s internal anxieties and the CIA’s own mythology of omniscience. Ames isn’t merely blaming the system; he’s bargaining with history. If he can convince you the machine produced little, then his sabotage becomes less catastrophic, his motives less venal, his crimes less uniquely damaging. It’s cynicism as self-defense, delivered in the calm cadence of an insider who knows exactly what “worthwhile” is supposed to sound like.