William Colby Quotes

I would not put C.I.A. officers at risk by asking them to undertake risky, controversial activity again.

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 CIA was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.

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

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.

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

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.

A chief of station is the head of all intelligence operations in any given country.

The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going.

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.

We need to make is to strengthen the position of the director of the CIA.

The men and women of the CIA are a national treasure.

When I was younger, I actually wanted to be a CIA agent. Really. I even did the online questionnaire.

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

Well look, CIA is an agency that has to collect intelligence, do operations. We have to take risks and it's important that we take risks and that we know that we have the support of the government and we have the support of the American people in what we're doing.

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 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.'

…the CIA has never carried out any action of a political nature, given any support of any nature, to any persons, potentates or movements, political or otherwise, without appropriate approval at a high potential level in our government outside the CIA.

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.

[Referring to the CIA:] We coexist. They work, and we work.

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.

What the Hell do those clowns do out there at Langley? Get the CIA jerks working on Cambodia.

Our agency (the Central Intelligence Agency) is the last refuge of organizational privacy available to the U. S. Government.