Mike Mansfield Quotes
Secrecy now beclouds everything about the Central Intelligence Agency—its cost, its efficiency, its success, its failures.
Mike Mansfield, 1903-2001, U.S. Ambassador to Japan, U.S. Senator (Democrat, MT), Senate Majority Leader, Speech, March 1954
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Intelligence agents tend to prefer covert activities to the less dramatic, non-exciting, activity of gathering and analyzing intelligence. Most national intelligence services tend to enlarge their portfolio to include covert activities regardless of what the national leaders intended. Because of the secrecy, they can often get away with this.
When Bob Casey was the CIA Director, he the declassification of all the operational files of the WWII Office of Strategic Service. The huge collection is referred to as Record Book 2.6
The American Embassy in Berlin had wiretapped the telephone and telegraph wires of the German Foreign Ministry. The man who did that was hired by Secretary of State Lansing as the first employee of the new unit.
In her younger days Steinham worked with the CIA. Originally the Office of Strategic Service, the precursor to the CIA, was an amalgam of some of the nation’s most educated and dedicated people who tended to be very idealistic in saving the world from fascists like Nazi Germany and Japan. The were extremely nonpolitical and were not involved in the liberal conservative battles that the agency got itself into as the Red Scare and the fear of Communism affected much of the society including the CIA.
This quotation comes as a major surprise to most people who perceive modern CIA as the MAJOR U.S. spying and covert action organization. It is a marvelous case study of agency “mission creep”.
Michael Joseph Mansfield was an American politician and diplomat. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a US Representative (1943–1953) and a US Senator (1953–1977) from Montana. He was the longest-serving Senate Majority Leader and served from 1961 to 1977. During his tenure, he shepherded Great Society programs through the Senate.
