William J. Donovan Quotes

It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

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.

The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.

In basic training we had been told to watch out for Japanese spies.

I had been involved in U.S. intelligence in Berlin, Germany, while in the military and had worked with a contact with the Central Intelligence Agency office there.

I am unable to tell a quarter of a billion Americans what we are doing on their behalf, because if I did, it would become the table of contents of the training manual of the enemy.

In World War Two, in the OSS, we knew what our motivation was: to beat the goddamn Nazis. In the Cold War, we knew what our motivation was: to beat the Goddamn Russians. Suddenly the Cold War is over, and what is the motivation? What would compel someone to spend their lives doing this kind of thing?

I do not see Japanese invasion of the Philippines as a probability because the hazards would be too great for the Japanese .... We know a great deal that the Japanese are not aware we know, and we are familiar with their plans to a certain extent ... .

Bill Stephenson taught us all we ever knew about foreign intelligence.

I served 10 years on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, and I had the distinct privilege of meeting with real U.S. spies throughout the globe.

I spent over ten years in the Central Intelligence Agency as an undercover operations officer serving overseas after 9/11 where I carried out covert operations against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, as well as other countries who are 'hostile to liberty,' as I like to say.

Spies are a most important element in water, because on them depends an army's ability to move.

I favor an aggressive expansion of America's intelligence capabilities domestically and around the world.

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.

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.

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

'The Man Who Never Was,' by Ewen Montagu, remains the best book about wartime espionage written by an active participant - incomplete, and dry in parts, it nonetheless summons up the ingenuity and sheer eccentricity of those who played this strange and dangerous game.

I think that, in the end, the military behavior and intelligence services are not very different from each other. It's an attitude of hunters; they're observing the prey.

In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.

We should be adult enough to understand that major countries are going to be spying on us.

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

Intelligence without counter-intelligence is useless.

Sure we have smart bombs that can blow up any target in the world, but we don’t know which ones to blow up.

For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.