Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

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.

The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.

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.

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.

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

I am unable to tell a quarter of a billion Americans what we are doing on their behalf, because if I did, it would become the table of contents of the training manual of the enemy.

Follow the money, and one arrives at a basic fact: the CIA’s edge is paramilitary.

Europeans don't like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don't spy.

Exposing the activities of a foreign intelligence service renders them ineffective, since it removes plausible deniability, which is the hallmark of covert intelligence operations.

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

Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.

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.

Since that time I have had continuous contact with the persons who were completely unknown to me, except that I knew they would hand whatever information I gave them to the Russian authorities.

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

No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

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.

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

I will not, nor will I ever, publicly divulge sensitive intelligence sources and methods. For when that happens, our national security is endangered and lives can be lost.

Like any good spy novel, the Cox Report alleges that Chinese spies penetrated four U.S. weapons research labs and stole important information on seven nuclear warhead designs.

Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.

The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together.

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

When people ask me if I have worked for the C.I.A., I often answer: what good to you is my answer? Because if I did, I might not say so.