Dean Acheson Quotes

Everything the CIA does is secret and it is secret particularly from the Congress.

When you join the CIA, you have to make some peace with whether you are comfortable psychologically and philosophically, with the use of force and using it clandestinely.

Governmental officials -- including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law --have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law. The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities

The CIA claims that secrecy is necessary to hide what it's doing from enemies of the United States ... the real reason for secrecy is to hide what the CIA is doing from the American people.

The shadowy world of foreign intelligence-gathering – the American government’s most secret and least accountable enterprise – is now the Bush administration’s main legal weapon in the war on terrorism.

I had the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the President that as set up, neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or control it.

The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.

It's inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.

Anyone who tells you he deals with the CIA is either a fool (for admitting it) or a braggart.

Secrecy now beclouds everything about CIA—its cost, its efficiency, its successes, and its failures.

The nation must to a degree take it on faith that we [the CIA] too are honorable men devoted to her service.

Intelligence is about lies. If something is legal and above board, you would not need the CIA to do it.

The United States is the only country in the world that has ever released the operations files of its intelligence agency.

Secrecy now beclouds everything about the Central Intelligence Agency—its cost, its efficiency, its success, its failures.

Congress has really serious oversight powers over Intelligence Agencies that they have not exercised in recent years.

If you are completely transparent, then you have no intelligence service.

The combination of secrecy and bureaucracy in the CIA has led to a special kind of disaster.

“Covert Activity” in the United States is defined by law…. “Covert” and “Clandestine” don’t mean the same thing. That which is clandestine is secret but attributable. That which is covert is secret but not attributable. We define this kind of activity in legislation. I love this country

I've yet to meet a President who controlled the CIA.

As I have said in the past, revealing specific targets or successes of U.S. intelligence activities is not in the public interest.

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.

The activities that went on at Camp King between 1946 and the late 1950s have never been fully accounted for by either the Department of Defense or the CIA.

There is no part of the executive branch that more exists on the outer edge of executive prerogative than the American intelligence community - the intelligence community, CIA, covert action. My literal responsibility as director of CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval, to inform.

You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk.

My literal responsibility as director of the CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval; to inform.