Lauren Willig Quotes

I think I'm probably an assassin and not a Templar, but no doubt we're probably run by people with Templar mentalities.

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.

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

There are few archbishops in espionage. He's on our side and that's all that matters. Besides, one needn't ask him to one's club.

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

Intelligence gathered by this government leaves no doubt

It is the nature of covert activities to be controversial.

Intelligence is about lies. If something is legal and above board, you would not need the CIA to do it.

Every intelligence agency has contacts with unsavory characters. I don’t think you would get any denial from … the CIA that people in their … organization have contacts with members of groups that have different agendas from the government. But that doesn’t mean that that they are being directed or being approved or otherwise given a seal of approval.

Governments and spy agencies, including those of democratic countries, have often enlisted criminals to smuggle weapons to allied insurgents abroad or even to assassinate enemies abroad.

It’s [the CIA] an organization that thrives on deception. How do you manage an organization like that?

'Day Men' provides a magnificent challenge in that it deals with a secret society within a secret society.

It will be the CIA's mission and my own if confirmed to ensure that the agency remains the best in the world at its core mission - collecting what our enemies do not want us to know. In short, the CIA must be the world's premier espionage organization.

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies... That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

At the end of the day, I like the spy genre, as opposed to the action movie genre, because spies are smart. The successful spies are the smarter spies.

The term blowback, which officials of the Central Intelligent Agency first invented for their own internal use, . . . refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign act of terrorists or drug lords or rogue states or illegal arms merchants often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.

For the Order wishes to be secret and to work in silence; for thus it is better secured from the oppression of the ruling powers, and because this secrecy gives a greater zest to the whole.

There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.

We're Vatican assassins. How complicated can it be?

Opus Dei is an efficient machine run to achieve world power.

I'm not against the FBI investigation in doing a proper role, but I'm against the FBI spying on people like Martin Luther King. I'm against the CIA fighting secret wars and overthrowing government.

A spider web of 'patriots for profit', operating from the highest positions of special trust and confidence, have successfully circumvented our constitutional system in pursuit of a New World Order.

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

The intelligence community is very professional, they do their jobs well, they're the best intelligence gatherers in the world. They're dedicated, patriotic Americans. They will work with any president. They want to have a good relationship with every president.

None these organizations [terrorists] could continue operating without the narcotics networks, human-trafficking and oil smuggling. Addressing it requires a truly creative global response similar to that used to stand up against Germany's aggression in World War II.