John Brady Kiesling Quotes

Are there topics of sufficient import to the nation's well-being to replace the Soviets as the focus of U.S. intelligence?

Even when I was at CIA, I'd go to visit foreign leaders and I'd say, 'You know, I'm not a diplomat. I'm just an old CIA guy'... I said, 'If I wanted to be diplomatic, I'd have been a diplomat.'

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

The intelligence failures with respect to Iraq were massive and have damaged our credibility around the world.

Looking back over my more than a half century in intelligence, I have not experienced a time when we've been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.

I do not believe that reorganization will fix what is wrong with our intelligence community….Failures were caused by performance, not organization.

The CIA’s intelligence was in many cases simply Bill Casey’s ideology.

The manner in which intelligence indicators were handled in the Cuba situation may well be the most serious flaw in our intelligence system, and one which, if uncorrected, could lead to the gravest consequences

The only remaining superpower doesn’t have enough interest in what’s going on in the world to organize and run an espionage service.

Bill Stephenson taught us all we ever knew about foreign intelligence.

Europeans don't like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don't spy.

No one wants to friend or follow covert info about Pakistan's nuclear policy.

SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.

A major theme in all my books is that the CIA is not only the first line of defense but they should also be the first line of offense.

I think all governments engage in intelligence gathering vis-a-vis other governments.

Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

The skills of the British intelligence community are a great national asset.

If you look back today over the last 25 years, it is a fact that we have had a progressive degeneration of our intelligence community in general; in particular in the field of human intelligence.

I was an intelligence officer, not a policy-maker.

In my professional work with the Agency, by the late '70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy.

The State Department desperately needs to be vigorously harnessed. It has too big a role to play in the formulation of foreign policy, and foreign policy is too important to be left up to foreign service officers.

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.

Pat Roberts and I both feel very strongly that when we get to Iran, that we can't make the same mistakes. We have to ask the questions, the hard questions before, not afterwards, and get the right intelligence.

Unfortunately, the historical record of failure to prevent strategic surprises is overwhelming. In conventional warfare, victims usually misread the evidence or miscalculate their responses, and they can suffer surprise even when their intelligence collection systems and defensive preparations are impressive.