Ronald Kessler Quotes

You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk.

It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.

As the CIA is set up neither you, the National Security Council, nor anyone else will be in a position to know what it is doing or control it.

The CIA claims that secrecy is necessary to hide what it's doing from enemies of the United States ... the real reason for secrecy is to hide what the CIA is doing from the American people.

It's inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.

It is incontestable that even under the best of circumstances and when dealing with the friendliest and most stable of allies that intelligence organizations of foreign powers must not be permitted to become established on American soil and should be discouraged wherever possible from taking root any place in this Hemisphere.

Abolish the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Intelligence gathered by this government leaves no doubt

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

This country, for reasons of history, culture and therefore law, has had an allergy to domestic intelligence.

We would not have a national discussion without the actions of Edward Snowden. Democracy is at work because of Edward Snowden.

The Snowden leaks were important – a legitimate scoop – and we might never have known about the NSA’s law breaking if it had not been for them.

What Edward Snowden did amounted to the greatest hemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of my nation.

As the plot of 'Condor' unfolds, you'll understand that nothing is sacred in the pharmacy world or in the behind-the-scenes workings of the CIA and FBI.

We should stop thinking of Snowden, to the extent that we ever were, as a hero. We should stop thinking of him as a whistleblower.

As a former FBI counterintelligence agent who investigated foreign propaganda cases, I've seen firsthand how foreign intelligence services leverage American freedoms - and the constitutional limitations on the FBI's investigative power - to their advantage.

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

Look, the FBI has the tools necessary un-American activities in our country. It goes on, we shouldn't even be talking about it.

You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will.

Even the Intelligence agency has an office of public affairs which may seem like an oxymoron.

The Snowden leaks did cause damage.

The history of the intelligence community is replete with violations of the trust of the American people.

I worked with people like Edward Snowden. Well, not people who took stuff home.

American political elites feel very empowered to criticize the American intelligence community for not doing enough when they feel in danger, and as soon as we've made them feel safe again, they feel equally empowered to complain that we're doing too much.

President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed.