To the extent that I considered the personal burden of harming the people who had trusted me, plus the Agency, or the United States, I wasn’t processing that.

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.

Foreign Ministry guys don’t become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.

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

My little scam in April ’85 went like this: Give me $50,000; here’s some names of some people we’ve recruited.

Historians don’t really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low.

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.

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.

The resistance of policy-makers to intelligence is not just founded on an ideological presupposition. They distrust intelligence sources and intelligence officials because they don’t understand what the real problems are.

I’m a traitor, but I don’t consider myself a traitor.