Robert Mueller Quotes

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.

We want our spying agencies spying on foreigners. That’s why we have them.

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.

The dirty little secret of the intelligence world is that much of what you really need to know isn't exactly a secret anyway.

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.

The office has oversight of people who do analysis and oversight of people who do operations, but it is not charged with doing either. That is an important point to make. Those functions are performed by the CIA, DIA and other agencies.

When I was about, I'd say, 18 or 19 years old, I wanted to be a part of the CIA just because they know those intimate secrets... So I was just always into knowing. I like to know things.

For some, the very act of intelligence gathering seems illegitimate when applied to the crime of terrorism.

Most of the results of using technical bugging devices were of little importance for my service. It may have been different in counter-intelligence, where bugs in flats, etc., were used to obtain a lot of information about what counter-intelligence was interested in.

One of my own guiding principles in intelligence work was ... not to make a mystery of what is a matter of common knowledge or obvious to friend and foe alike.

The simple truth is that the inspectors will never find anything the location of which has not been discovered through intelligence operations.

We were bereft of any human intelligence—zero, nada, in terms of agents on the ground…. We had no answers.

Our foreign intelligence was little more than what a military attache could learn at dinner.

Bureau of Secret Intelligence.

We have 17 different intelligence agencies and they are all basic;ly doing the same thing.

Intelligence collection is not confined to the communications of adversaries or of the guilty. Rather, it's about gaining information otherwise unavailable that would help keep Americans safe and free.

If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America's vast intelligence infrastructure.

The aim of a foreign intelligence service is to find and convince individuals to help them achieve intelligence objectives.

Every intelligence operation carries risks.

As a former F.B.I. special agent who conducted counterintelligence investigations, I can attest that foreign intelligence services do not operate on the basis of explicit agreements or even actions that, standing alone, constitute criminal activity.

We need to gather intelligence, but we need to do so legally.

We sit for a week and listen to an extraordinary amount of people talk about what they do in the intelligence world. It's pretty overwhelming.

U.S. intelligence services routinely use collection methods against foreigners that foreseeably - with certainty - ingest high volumes of U.S. communications as well.

Well look, CIA is an agency that has to collect intelligence, do operations. We have to take risks and it's important that we take risks and that we know that we have the support of the government and we have the support of the American people in what we're doing.

I think all governments engage in intelligence gathering vis-a-vis other governments.