Groucho Marx Quotes

Intelligence without counter-intelligence is useless.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.

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.

The purpose of an intelligence service is to avoid war, not to promote one.

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.

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

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.

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

I am always up to steal secrets from smart people.

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

If you look back today over the last 25 years, it is a fact that we have had a progressive degeneration of our intelligence community in general; in particular in the field of human intelligence.

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

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.

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.

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.

There is only one law of espionage—there are always going to be spies.

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.

Espionage is largely separate from the mainstream of foreign policy … you nail the spy and you punish him, and you move on.

With terrorism becoming the increasing tactic of choice, the military component would become a smaller component of our national security system.

This town leaks like a sieve. Sometimes I think that the easiest thing on the world would be to be a spy against the United States of America

Intelligence is about lies. If something is legal and above board, you would not need the CIA to do it.

There are more foreign intelligence officers inside the US now, working against US interests, than there were at the height of the cold war.

Prior to the present war [WWII], the United States had no foreign intelligence service. It never has had and does not have a coordinated intelligence service.