James Angleton Quotes

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.

While the interests of the Intelligence community should not be taken lightly, we must remember that they exist to serve, not dictate.

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

The NSA has shown, time and time again, it will seize on any wiggle room in the law .

I've yet to meet a President who controlled the CIA.

First of all, CIA follows the law.

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.

Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.

You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk.

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.

Governmental officials -- including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law --have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law. The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

Abolish the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

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.

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

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

The CIA and NSA are not supposed to be involved in American law enforcement.

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

We want our spying agencies spying on foreigners. That’s why we have them.

The history of the intelligence community is replete with violations of the trust of the American people.

American political elites feel very empowered to criticize the American intelligence community for not doing enough when they feel in danger, and as soon as we've made them feel safe again, they feel equally empowered to complain that we're doing too much.

Experts say that Britain and France have strong spy agencies; Germany's is competent but afraid to level with its public; the rest are relatively weak, and there is no Europe-wide spy agency.

It is illegal for the CIA to spy on Americans and an affront to our Republic to spy on the Senate.

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.

My literal responsibility as director of the CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval; to inform.