Julia Child Quotes

If you walk into the front hallway of the CIA, you will see, on your left, a statue of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan. Bill Donovan was the person who created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was America's spy agency during World War II and then kind of morphed into what's now the CIA.

The men and women of the CIA are a national treasure.

I was with the CIA for only three years. I worked in the Directorate of Operations, which is now called the National Clandestine Service. It's the part of the organization where the spies live. I didn't have much experience beyond the training.

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

The Abwehr [Nazi-Germany's secret intelligence service] gets better treatment from the FBI than we do.

Prior to the present war [WWII], the United States had no foreign intelligence service. It never has had and does not have a coordinated intelligence service.

Bureau of Secret Intelligence.

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.

I never worked for any secret service, certainly not the Israeli secret service.

I worked in the Mossad for a few years.

I joined the CIA in 1985 as an operations officer in the Clandestine Service.

I know CIA like the back of my hand.

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.

We need to make is to strengthen the position of the director of the CIA.

When I was younger, I actually wanted to be a CIA agent. Really. I even did the online questionnaire.

A major theme in all my books is that the CIA is not only the first line of defense but they should also be the first line of offense.

As an old man who remembers the intellectual exhilaration and the pleasure of having done good work that characterized the CIA when it was young, I wonder if it might not be better to speak and think in terms of restoring its culture.

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.

In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building.

I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations.

In my professional work with the Agency, by the late '70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy.

I suddenly realized at the CIA that I had to make life-and-death decisions about people.

By the late '70s I had come to question the point of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the CIA's overall charter.

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

The CIA was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.