Trenton Lee Stewart Quotes

Yes; we have a specific procedure which we follow in all cases where the Agency is in contact, for the purposes of acquiring intelligence or whatever the case may be, with an individual.

He’s being held prisoner on a ceramic-lined cookie sheet in the oven,” Thomas said. “I figured he couldn’t jigger his way out of a bunch of steel, and it would give him something to think about before we start asking questions.” “That’s an awful thing to do to one of the Little Folk, man,” I said. “I’m planning to start making a pie in front of him.” “Nice.” “Thank you.

Law enforcement has always had informants and people they've had to deal with, who walk a certain line. They're choosing between the lesser of two evils. They're befriend one person to gain access to another person, who's a bigger fish.

From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, "Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.") Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance.

Everybody spies on everybody.

The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a [New York City] police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

If this was a graduating class of CIA case officers my advice would be short and to the point: Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counteraccusations.

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

We've used the power that we have had to listen in to everybody so that we could better promote our agenda

Hollywood does tend to portray CIA officers as totally the honey trap. Looks matter as they do in any profession. But the most important thing for me when I was working was blending into my environment.

In the CIA, they recruit you to be an officer, an ops officer, in part due to how well you cope with stress and how well you adapt to new situations.

I would be a terrible CIA officer in real life.

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

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

It is hard to work with the nagging doubt that perhaps some foreign intelligence agency is reading all your correspondence, especially when you know they have done so in the past.

One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.

Intelligence collection is not confined to the communications of adversaries or of the guilty. Rather, it's about gaining information otherwise unavailable that would help keep Americans safe and free.

I could have been a top notch spy. People confess the most amazing secrets to me, even when I am not fishing for those nuggets. I must look trustworthy because I sit there with a video camera or a tape recorder while the stories pour out.

We're not interested in applications where you're spying on people.

I was a case officer, otherwise known as an operations officer. My role was to go out and convince Al Qaeda operatives to instead work with us as well as to convince people and officials in foreign governments to work on behalf of the U.S. government secretly.

Pummeling an answer out of someone never works. You cannot intimidate someone with aggressive language and think they'll be more forthcoming... that's a caricature of interrogation, part of the TV culture of what it looks like.

The members of the National Clandestine Service of the CIA are called the collectors of last resort. They are tasked to seek the truth when all other avenues of intelligence collection have failed.

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

Every intelligence operation carries risks.

When I did counterintelligence investigations, they rarely saw the inside of a courtroom. That wasn't the goal of them.