Aaron Eckhart Quotes

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.

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.

Clandestine intelligence operations involve a constant breaking of all the rules.. To put it baldly, such operations are extra legal and sometimes illegal.

Everybody thinks it's glamorous and this spy versus spy stuff is so exciting, but working in that industry and being a CIA operative, like a field officer, is tough. That's a difficult job that usually dismantles their lives in some capacity.

'The Man Who Never Was,' by Ewen Montagu, remains the best book about wartime espionage written by an active participant - incomplete, and dry in parts, it nonetheless summons up the ingenuity and sheer eccentricity of those who played this strange and dangerous game.

In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.

It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.

I've always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts.

For some, the very act of intelligence gathering seems illegitimate when applied to the crime of terrorism.

I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.

I would have loved to have met some former spies, but they don't readily advertise themselves unless they're not living in Moscow, and even then. I'm sure I've met some without realizing it.

If you want to know what a terrorist is doing, you have to put an agent in their camp.

Intelligence gathered by this government leaves no doubt

It is the nature of covert activities to be controversial.

In a global and totalitarian war, intelligence must be global and totalitarian.

Governments and spy agencies, including those of democratic countries, have often enlisted criminals to smuggle weapons to allied insurgents abroad or even to assassinate enemies abroad.

You can probably forgive the top spy for lying about spying. Lying is part of the job description. It’s what spies do.

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

CIA will not develop operations to penetrate another Government agency, even with the approval of its leadership.

In covert action you always have to think of the endgame before you start it. We didn’t always do that.

“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 was working for the CIA and prohibited from speaking publicly.

I served 10 years on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, and I had the distinct privilege of meeting with real U.S. spies throughout the globe.

I worked in the Mossad for a few years.

I was a case officer, otherwise known as an operations officer. My role was to go out and convince Al Qaeda operatives to instead work with us as well as to convince people and officials in foreign governments to work on behalf of the U.S. government secretly.