Aldrich Ames Quotes
When Reagan was elected, I felt that the Agency had gone much more into the service of a political tendency in the country with which I had already felt very strong disagreement.
Ames, Aldrich. Interview. Cold War, CNN, 1998.
The Republican party had lurched so far to the right, that a Republican like Reagan could never win the nomination even though he could likely win a national election.
This true statement hurt Reagan somewhat but not enough to defeat him. At the time, only a small percentage of Americans had any experiences yet with what became one of the most popular programs in American history. Reagan, once in office never repeated any of his early anti-Medicare statements and ironically, in the 8 years of the Reagan Presidency, Medicare became extremely popular.
Aldrich Hazen "Rick" Ames is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer turned KGB double agent, who was convicted of espionage in 1994. He is serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, in the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana, United States. Ames was formerly a 31-year CIA counterintelligence officer who committed espionage against the U.S. by spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. At the time of his arrest, Ames had compromised more highly classified CIA assets than any other officer in history until Robert Hanssen's arrest seven years later in 2001.
