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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.
The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.
Espionage, for the most part, involves finding a person who knows something or has something that you can induce them secretly to give to you. That almost always involves a betrayal of trust.
Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.
Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.
There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results.
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.
We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn’t support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap.
Foreign Ministry guys don’t become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.
I found that our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.