Peter Landesman Quotes

We sit for a week and listen to an extraordinary amount of people talk about what they do in the intelligence world. It's pretty overwhelming.

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.

Intelligence, like any other aspect of national security, has to be under civilian control.

The simple truth is that the inspectors will never find anything the location of which has not been discovered through intelligence operations.

America’s military defense capability owes more to the Israeli intelligence input than it does to any other single source of intelligence… it’s value is worth more than five CIAs

Bureau of Secret Intelligence.

It is not the intelligence community's place to set and implement policy.

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

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

[Donald Trump] has also promised an intelligence surge [in Syria]. Mike Flynn knows a lot about that. Tactically, Mike Flynn has been fantastic with intelligence when he was in the military. They'll be looking at that.

The Committee's review of a series of intelligence shortcomings, to include intelligence prior to 9/11 and the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, clearly reveal how vital a diverse intelligence workforce is to our national security.

Our intelligence community needs better coordination of operations and exchange of information, and that's why we need an overall director of national intelligence and a national counterterrorism center.

I don't want to talk about intelligence matters. I will say, however, that intelligence-community estimates should not become public in the way of this city and in the way of Congress.

It's hard for me to imagine that some people in the CIA who had firsthand knowledge would be unable to recognize that this would be helpful information for a soldier's death.

Richard M. Helms, the first director of Central Intelligence to rise from the ranks, was fond of saying that the CIA had been founded to make sure that there would never be another Pearl Harbor. Underlying this mission impossible was the wishful supposition that an America that knew everything could prevent anything.

It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.

My experience is the White House is not a very good place to coordinate intelligence, much less to integrate it.

I was an intelligence officer, not a policy-maker.

I do have concerns about the current efforts to restructure our nation's intelligence community.

There are times when the Central Intelligence Agency makes policy by default.

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

… policy has shaped intelligence more than vice versa.

We were bereft of any human intelligence—zero, nada, in terms of agents on the ground…. We had no answers.

Our foreign intelligence was little more than what a military attache could learn at dinner.

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.