Ted Stevens Quotes

Intelligence is a sacred cow. We’ve done nothing since we’ve been here about it. The CIA isn’t worth a damn.

… policy has shaped intelligence more than vice versa.

Another factor is the decision, made in 1976, to sharply divide the FBI and the foreign intelligence agencies. The FBI would collect within the United States; the foreign intelligence agencies would collect overseas.

I believe that reforming our intelligence community is one of the most important things that we can do in order to ensure that our country is in fact safer, stronger and wiser.

Bureau of Secret Intelligence.

The Committee's review of a series of intelligence shortcomings, to include intelligence prior to 9/11 and the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, clearly reveal how vital a diverse intelligence workforce is to our national security.

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.

Our intelligence community needs better coordination of operations and exchange of information, and that's why we need an overall director of national intelligence and a national counterterrorism center.

I don't want to talk about intelligence matters. I will say, however, that intelligence-community estimates should not become public in the way of this city and in the way of Congress.

My experience is the White House is not a very good place to coordinate intelligence, much less to integrate it.

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.

Intelligence, like any other aspect of national security, has to be under civilian control.

Secrecy now beclouds everything about CIA—its cost, its efficiency, its successes, and its failures.

There are times when the Central Intelligence Agency makes policy by default.

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.

It is not the intelligence community's place to set and implement policy.

Obama found a lot of people that think just like he does, and he put them in the intelligence community. Can you imagine? When you think of the intelligence community, don't you think of super patriots, don't you think of people out there even risking their lives to defend and protect the Constitution and the people of this country and this country itself as founded? No. That's not the kind of people Obama put at the CIA.

In the 1990s, human intelligence gathering was seriously neglected.

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.

George Tenet has been the director of central intelligence since 1997, time enough to have changed the Agency's culture. He has failed. He should go.

I have had national security background, 10 years on the Intelligence Committee, the last two years as chair.

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.

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