Carl von Clausewitz Quotes

When I first deployed as a military intelligence officer my resources were a map, a grease pencil and two corporals.

Spies are a most important element in water, because on them depends an army's ability to move.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Spying is a like a game of chess: Sometimes you have to withdraw, sometimes you have to sacrifice one of your pieces to win - preferably a knight rather than a king or queen.

One of my own guiding principles in intelligence work was ... not to make a mystery of what is a matter of common knowledge or obvious to friend and foe alike.

Intelligence without counter-intelligence is useless.

It [the CIA] was not intended as a Cloak & Dagger Outfit. It was intended merely as a center for keeping the President of what was going on in the World…I never wanted the CIA to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized.

Unless more efforts based upon long-range planning are put into military preparations and operations, it will be very hard to win the final victory.

Tact ops is a unit which breaks into homes and offices to plant bugging devices. They get into mafia hangouts, they go into embassies, they go into terrorist hangouts, and they describe themselves as court-sanctioned burglars.

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.

The Queen's intelligence network is a hell of a lot better than anyone's in this palace. Bar none. She knows everything. I don't know how she does it. And she sees everything.

The most important thing you need to know about the Pentagon is that it is not in charge of today's wars but rather tomorrow's wars.

Simply stated, the need for accurate intelligence and prescient analysis from CIA has never been greater than it is in 2013 - or than it will be in the coming years.

I think that, in the end, the military behavior and intelligence services are not very different from each other. It's an attitude of hunters; they're observing the prey.

As a nation we have, over the past seven years, been rebuilding our intelligence with powerful capabilities that many thought we would no longer need after the Cold War. We have been rebuilding our clandestine service, our satellite and other technical collection, our analytical depth and expertise.

It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.

I was in a peacetime army. It was like something out of a Le Carre novel: studying the habits of your enemy. It was very exciting. It's interesting living life as a civilian, then on Friday night you're parachuting into a foreign country.

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

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 find a difference in British spy fiction and American spy fiction. In the American version, it's more militaristic, partly because the CIA has more of the military makeup. Whereas MI6 is more of a cerebral, intelligence-based, relationship-based service, i.e., all they do is recruit people to get information out of them.

In basic training we had been told to watch out for Japanese spies.

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.

Fighting wars is not so much about killing people as it is about finding things out. The more you know, the more likely you are to win a battle.

Able Danger was a top-secret military planning operation, established in '99 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to identify cells of al-Qaida worldwide and to take out al Qaida terrorists. They identified five cells worldwide, one of them in Brooklyn.