George C. Marshall Quotes

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 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 aim of a foreign intelligence service is to find and convince individuals to help them achieve intelligence objectives.

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

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

…in time of peace the bulk of intelligence can be obtained through overt channels… It can also be obtained…through the many Americans, business and professional men and American residents of foreign countries, who are naturally and normally brought in touch with what is going on in those countries.

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.

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.

Bill Stephenson taught us all we ever knew about foreign intelligence.

Intelligence is often viewed as a profession that steals secrets and then knits those secrets together for policymakers in order to inform their judgments.

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

I've long maintained during my 50-plus year career in intelligence that leaks endanger national security, they compromise sources, methods, and tradecraft, and they can put assets' lives at risk.

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

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

I think that, in the end, the military behavior and intelligence services are not very different from each other. It's an attitude of hunters; they're observing the prey.

As a nation we have, over the past seven years, been rebuilding our intelligence with powerful capabilities that many thought we would no longer need after the Cold War. We have been rebuilding our clandestine service, our satellite and other technical collection, our analytical depth and expertise.

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.

I think around the world, our agents are the best collectors of information you'll find.

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.

In my professional work with the Agency, by the late '70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy.

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.

Intelligence collection has its place—no question—… But no matter how important collection is, in the short and even the long run, it just doesn’t cost very much.

If you want to know what a terrorist is doing, you have to put an agent in their camp.

It is incontestable that even under the best of circumstances and when dealing with the friendliest and most stable of allies that intelligence organizations of foreign powers must not be permitted to become established on American soil and should be discouraged wherever possible from taking root any place in this Hemisphere.