Lucius D. Clay Quotes

But the technology was accessible, which suggests incompetence on the part of our counterintelligence community and the Clinton Administration, and may in fact rise to the level of treason.

You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the nature of the intelligence business.

I thought that you guys [the CIA] had people everywhere, that you knew about everything, and now you don't even know anything about a raggedy-ass, little fourth rate country. All you have to do is get some Chinese coolies from a San Francisco laundry shop and drop them over there and use them.

Spies are great, and when you need 'em, you need 'em. But they are no substitute for insight.

] The vast industry of mutual surveillance that grew up alongside the industry of mutual destruction is not about to disappear. The spies, like the weapons, are here to stay. And proliferate, sooner or later, whether we like it or not.

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

Prior to 9-11, we did not have a single intelligence agent inside Iraq.

The only remaining superpower doesn’t have enough interest in what’s going on in the world to organize and run an espionage service.

Among the colonists were spies who took note of the conversations and the schemes of the natives and supplied the information to the governors, who sent it to Cuzco without delay, to be submitted to the Inca. In this way all was made secure.

The CIA in real life, we know, is looking for new kinds of cover. It's looking for new platforms, as they like to say, and it's trying to use the revolution in communications technology, the ability to use all sorts of corporate entities in ways that are hard to detect to get our spies in the places where they need to be.

A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life

Innocence is ignorance.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

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

It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life.

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.

Ignorance per se is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance.

Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.

Female spies typically represented one of two extremes: the seductress who employed her wiles to manipulate men, and the cross-dresser who blended in by impersonating them.

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.

If you look back today over the last 25 years, it is a fact that we have had a progressive degeneration of our intelligence community in general; in particular in the field of human intelligence.

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

We planted bugs, microphones, in premises which interested us in the West. We weren't too successful - I would have said unfortunately in former years, but I don't care anymore now.

Having watched the form of our traitors for a number of years, I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.