David Ignatius Quotes

You can probably forgive the top spy for lying about spying. Lying is part of the job description. It’s what spies do.

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

If this was a graduating class of CIA case officers my advice would be short and to the point: Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counteraccusations.

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 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.

Anyone who tells you he deals with the CIA is either a fool (for admitting it) or a braggart.

Secrecy is as essential to Intelligence as vestments to a Mass, or darkness to a spiritualist seance, and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.

Everything the CIA does is secret and it is secret particularly from the Congress.

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

It’s [the CIA] an organization that thrives on deception. How do you manage an organization like that?

I would be a terrible CIA officer in real life.

I really wanted to be a spy. I guess it's a bit like acting, where you play a role.

I spent close to a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA and have spent most of my adult life collecting intelligence and protecting sources and methods.

The life of spies is to know, not bee known.

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies... That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

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.

In my head, I think I'd make a perfect spy, but in reality, I don't think I'd fare very well.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

I've always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts.

For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.

I've always wanted to play a spy, because it is the ultimate acting exercise. You are never what you seem.

When you join the CIA, you have to make some peace with whether you are comfortable psychologically and philosophically, with the use of force and using it clandestinely.

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.

I had been given some training in my past CIA career to do just this sort of thing ... floating forged newspaper accounts, telegrams, that sort of thing.

Only one thing is worse [for a CIA Agent] than having no sources, and that is to be seduced by sources telling lies.