Michael Hayden Quotes

As a former career intelligence professional, I have a profound appreciation for the value of intelligence. Intelligence disrupts terrorist plots and thwarts attacks. Intelligence saves lives.

Simply stated, the need for accurate intelligence and prescient analysis from CIA has never been greater than it is in 2013 - or than it will be in the coming years.

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

Intelligence is our first line of defense against terrorism, and we must improve the collection capabilities and analysis of intelligence to protect the security of the United States and its allies.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Improving our national intelligence capabilities should remain a top priority and a continual process.

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

As a nation we have, over the past seven years, been rebuilding our intelligence with powerful capabilities that many thought we would no longer need after the Cold War. We have been rebuilding our clandestine service, our satellite and other technical collection, our analytical depth and expertise.

I think around the world, our agents are the best collectors of information you'll find.

An espionage organization is a collector: it collects raw information. That gets processed by a machinery that is supposed to resolve its reliability, and to present a finished product.

Governments in countries across the world have a duty to do everything possible to keep the public safe from terrorist attacks.

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.

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

The skills of the British intelligence community are a great national asset.

Yes; we have a specific procedure which we follow in all cases where the Agency is in contact, for the purposes of acquiring intelligence or whatever the case may be, with an individual.

I believe that reforming our intelligence community is one of the most important things that we can do in order to ensure that our country is in fact safer, stronger and wiser.

There is still much to be done by our intelligence community to bring its achievements up to an acceptable level.

The shadowy world of foreign intelligence-gathering – the American government’s most secret and least accountable enterprise – is now the Bush administration’s main legal weapon in the war on terrorism.

Intelligence without counter-intelligence is useless.

It [the CIA] was not intended as a Cloak & Dagger Outfit. It was intended merely as a center for keeping the President of what was going on in the World…I never wanted the CIA to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized.

Secrecy now beclouds everything about the Central Intelligence Agency—its cost, its efficiency, its success, its failures.