Stephen Hadley Quotes

Our failure was that our intelligence community thought [Saddam Hussein ] had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. That was a mistake. There is fallibility in human intelligence and in human decisions.

There has been a culture of misinformation among the intelligence leadership.

Thinking back, I now wonder if our mistake may have been in not considering whether the reason Saddam Hussein was so secretive about his weapons of mass destruction capabilities was not because he had the weapons and wanted to conceal them, but because he did not have them and he wanted to hide that.

George Tenet has been the director of central intelligence since 1997, time enough to have changed the Agency's culture. He has failed. He should go.

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.

There should be a mass purge of the CIA for incompetence…. There were 3,000 people killed on September 11, and not a single CIA operative has been fired. They missed that; they missed the weapons of mass destruction.

In the 1990s, human intelligence gathering was seriously neglected.

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.

I do not believe that reorganization will fix what is wrong with our intelligence community….Failures were caused by performance, not organization.

Directors of Central Intelligence are supposed to steer clear of policy.

Intelligence is a sacred cow. We’ve done nothing since we’ve been here about it. The CIA isn’t worth a damn.

The manner in which intelligence indicators were handled in the Cuba situation may well be the most serious flaw in our intelligence system, and one which, if uncorrected, could lead to the gravest consequences

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.

Prior to 9-11, we did not have a single intelligence agent inside Iraq.

… policy has shaped intelligence more than vice versa.

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.

People in charge of intelligence are political as well.

Dissenting analysts passionate about their positions are not unusual in the American intelligence community. Their presence - or even the rejection - of their favored positions is not prima face evidence of politicization.

An issue that really concerned me when I was on the House Intelligence Committee was the quality of analysis.

The intelligence community really is a vast bureaucratic entity, and it has been politicized in ways that are not effective for the gathering of intelligence and giving it to senior policymakers.

It's certainly not helpful when the commander in chief is a critic of the intelligence community.

In the late 1980s, the United States and Israel believed that they had good intelligence on Iraq, but they missed the extent of Saddam Hussein's pursuit of unconventional weapons - until after he invaded Kuwait.

We're not getting a good return on investment on all that money we're pumping into the intelligence community. One of the first things I would suggest is that if there's an attack and they fail to stop it or to alert us before it happens, that we ought to start cutting their budget, and for every attack they should lose ten percent of their budget.

It is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary so that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are fully informed as to what is actually being carried out by the intelligence community.