Benjamin Wittes Quotes

The United States is the only country in the world that has ever released the operations files of its intelligence agency.

I was working for the CIA and prohibited from speaking publicly.

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.

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

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.

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

The men who control the CIA are of an older, conservative generation which has kept the agency fifteen or twenty years behind the progress of the nation at large.

Our agency (the Central Intelligence Agency) is the last refuge of organizational privacy available to the U. S. Government.

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

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.

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.

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

So there is a foreign intelligence purpose for every one of our FISA warrants.

In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them.

Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.

The National Security Agency plays so highly specialized a role in the defense and security of the United States that an outsider can actually describe its activities. They are guarded not only from the public but from other government agencies as well. The Civil Service Commission, which audits all government positions, is not allowed to know what NSA employees do.

It's inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.

An intelligence service is the ideal vehicle for a conspiracy [against its own government]. Its members can travel about at home and abroad under secret orders, and no questions are asked. Every scrap of paper in the files, its membership, its expenditure of funds, its contacts, even enemy contacts, are state secrets.

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

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

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

Intelligence gathered by this government leaves no doubt

This country, for reasons of history, culture and therefore law, has had an allergy to domestic intelligence.

The public must know about the general outlines of surveillance activities in order to evaluate whether the government is achieving the appropriate balance between privacy and security.

CIA will not develop operations to penetrate another Government agency, even with the approval of its leadership.