Political Quotes

“I rise to offer an amendment to improve our Nation's counterintelligence capabilities. This amendment is identical to S. 1869, which Senator Boren and I introduced last month. When Boris Yeltsin gave his memorable speech to a joint session of Congress in 1991, he bluntly declared, ``No more lies.'' Perhaps because of the thunderous applause that followed, many Americans seem to have misheard him to say ``no more spies.'' We now know better. The point, though, is what we should have known all along. If anyone got the impression that the end of the cold war meant there would be no one left to come in from the cold, they did not get that impression from Moscow. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Warsaw Pact, Soviet and later Russian intelligence officials clearly stated that they were still hard at work and even were getting more aggressive at stealing business secrets. The FBI and others warned that the end of the cold war would produce no decline in espionage against the United States and, indeed, might lead to an increase since some Americans might be more comfortable selling secrets to countries that no longer appear to threaten us. The image of a cold war spy was of a Philby, Burgess or other high-level official driven by ideological zeal. But long before the cold war ended, these glamorous, derring-do agents of real life and fiction gave way to faceless bureaucrats whose zeal was not for the Red banner but the greenback.”