William J. Donovan Quotes

Prior to the present war [WWII], the United States had no foreign intelligence service. It never has had and does not have a coordinated intelligence service.

Having conducted counterintelligence investigations, I can attest that not everything a foreign intelligence service does is necessarily illegal.

I've been called a spy of Israel since 1996, and since I made my documentary film in 2000 the FBI has investigated me as an agent of Iraq. The FBI has also opened up an investigation into my wife calling her a KGB spy.

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

During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.

Espionage is largely separate from the mainstream of foreign policy … you nail the spy and you punish him, and you move on.

The purpose of an intelligence service is to avoid war, not to promote one.

There are more foreign intelligence officers inside the US now, working against US interests, than there were at the height of the cold war.

I have spent my adult life working in American intelligence. It has been quite an honor. Generally well resourced. A global mission. No want of issues. And it was a hell of a ride.

I spent over ten years in the Central Intelligence Agency as an undercover operations officer serving overseas after 9/11 where I carried out covert operations against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, as well as other countries who are 'hostile to liberty,' as I like to say.

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 human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

Throughout my career, I had the great fortune to experience firsthand as well as to witness what it means to be a CIA officer.

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.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn't have got Osama bin Laden - it took us years, but it happened.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.

I've always wanted to be a spy, and frankly I'm a little surprised that British intelligence has never approached me.

I had been involved in U.S. intelligence in Berlin, Germany, while in the military and had worked with a contact with the Central Intelligence Agency office there.

From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'

I suddenly realized at the CIA that I had to make life-and-death decisions about people.

The Abwehr [Nazi-Germany's secret intelligence service] gets better treatment from the FBI than we do.

Secrecy is as essential to Intelligence as vestments to a Mass, or darkness to a spiritualist seance, and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.

Intelligence without counter-intelligence is useless.