Valerie Plame Quotes

People in the CIA, they marry each other. They're like actors! We have to travel without much warning to far-flung places, and it's very hard to communicate what our experiences are like to those in the outside world.

[Referring to the CIA:] We coexist. They work, and we work.

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.

I joined the CIA in 1985 as an operations officer in the Clandestine Service.

The men and women of the CIA are a national treasure.

You know, as director of the CIA, I got an awful lot of intelligence about all the horrible things that could go on across the world.

When I was younger, I actually wanted to be a CIA agent. Really. I even did the online questionnaire.

Throughout my career, I had the great fortune to experience firsthand as well as to witness what it means to be a CIA officer.

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.

What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me.

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

Even when I was at CIA, I'd go to visit foreign leaders and I'd say, 'You know, I'm not a diplomat. I'm just an old CIA guy'... I said, 'If I wanted to be diplomatic, I'd have been a diplomat.'

Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

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.

I find a difference in British spy fiction and American spy fiction. In the American version, it's more militaristic, partly because the CIA has more of the military makeup. Whereas MI6 is more of a cerebral, intelligence-based, relationship-based service, i.e., all they do is recruit people to get information out of them.

During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.

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.

By the late '70s I had come to question the point of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the CIA's overall charter.

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.

I received a telegram from Allen Dulles in which he stated in effect that the revolution could not have succeeded but for what I did.

I thought that you guys [the CIA] had people everywhere, that you knew about everything, and now you don't even know anything about a raggedy-ass, little fourth rate country. All you have to do is get some Chinese coolies from a San Francisco laundry shop and drop them over there and use them.

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

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

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

CIA has more money: bigger houses than diplomats: bigger salaries: more weapons: more modern equipment