John le Carre Quotes

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

Bureau of Secret Intelligence.

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.

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.

We need to make is to strengthen the position of the director of the CIA.

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

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

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

I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.

There are few archbishops in espionage. He's on our side and that's all that matters. Besides, one needn't ask him to one's club.

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

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.

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

Nobody [at the CIA] had any idea of who was doing what where

The intelligence community is built, resourced, designed, trained, and focused around secrecy. We try to obtain the secrets of our adversaries and we try and keep secret how we are doing so.

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.

A chief of station is the head of all intelligence operations in any given country.

I first learned the power of trust in the CIA. There is no question that when I joined the Agency as a covert operations officer, it was still run along the 'old boys' network' model.

I never worked for any secret service, certainly not the Israeli secret service.

The dirty little secret of the intelligence world is that much of what you really need to know isn't exactly a secret anyway.

The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going.

Counterintelligence is, in effect, chasing ghosts, which is why the tools used to investigate foreign intelligence activity are secret, like human sources or electronic surveillance.

The members of the National Clandestine Service of the CIA are called the collectors of last resort. They are tasked to seek the truth when all other avenues of intelligence collection have failed.

If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America's vast intelligence infrastructure.

Within the Intelligence Community, CIA is the keeper of the human intelligence mission. Technical forms of collection are vital, but a good human source is unique and can deliver decisive intelligence on our adversaries' secrets - even their intent.