Warren Christopher Quotes

I do have concerns about the current efforts to restructure our nation's intelligence community.

… policy has shaped intelligence more than vice versa.

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.

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.

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

And I understand that, I testified in closed hearings over eight years because there are intelligence matters, there are sensitive matters that should not be held in a public hearing.

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

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

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

As I have said in the past, revealing specific targets or successes of U.S. intelligence activities is not in the public interest.

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.

You have multiple intelligence agencies. They all ultimately report to the director of national intelligence but, you know, it never comes in neat packages. So you have to make judgments on what you have, and it's not easy to do.

First, I have the privilege of being Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It is not an oxymoron I assure you.

When you're told to go brief a United States senator on a covert operation, you go do it. And you trust the information isn't going to leak.

There is no part of the executive branch that more exists on the outer edge of executive prerogative than the American intelligence community - the intelligence community, CIA, covert action. My literal responsibility as director of CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval, to inform.

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

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.

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.

I'm the chairman of the intelligence committee. We don't only get formal briefings, but we collect our information from the intelligence community in a variety of ways.

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.

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.

I was an intelligence officer, not a policy-maker.

The Homeland Security department doesn't have tasking authority in the intelligence community. They can ask for stuff, but they can't direct anything except inside their bureau.

In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them.

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.