Jim Kellis Quotes

Before I was elected to represent southwestern Texas in the U.S. Congress, I spent almost a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA. I served in places where Russia has geopolitical interests, and learned that Russia has one simple goal: to erode trust in democratic institutions.

What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me.

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.

When you join the CIA, you have to make some peace with whether you are comfortable psychologically and philosophically, with the use of force and using it clandestinely.

The CIA claims that secrecy is necessary to hide what it's doing from enemies of the United States ... the real reason for secrecy is to hide what the CIA is doing from the American people.

The CIA was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.

If you are completely transparent, then you have no intelligence service.

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.

I think even pro-China legislators would not believe I'm really a CIA agent.

Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in.

I've met enough KGB colonels in my life.

The activities that went on at Camp King between 1946 and the late 1950s have never been fully accounted for by either the Department of Defense or the CIA.

I learned later, just as a footnote, that the World Assembly of Youth was a CIA front.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

I had been involved in U.S. intelligence in Berlin, Germany, while in the military and had worked with a contact with the Central Intelligence Agency office there.

I received a telegram from Allen Dulles in which he stated in effect that the revolution could not have succeeded but for what I did.

Anyone who tells you he deals with the CIA is either a fool (for admitting it) or a braggart.

We should never send another spy to the Soviet Union. Honesty is all that is necessary.

An intelligence service is the ideal vehicle for a conspiracy [against its own government]. Its members can travel about at home and abroad under secret orders, and no questions are asked. Every scrap of paper in the files, its membership, its expenditure of funds, its contacts, even enemy contacts, are state secrets.

I thought that you guys [the CIA] had people everywhere, that you knew about everything, and now you don't even know anything about a raggedy-ass, little fourth rate country. All you have to do is get some Chinese coolies from a San Francisco laundry shop and drop them over there and use them.

[Referring to the CIA:] We coexist. They work, and we work.

Intelligence is about lies. If something is legal and above board, you would not need the CIA to do it.

The CIA … concealed its failures abroad, lying to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. It told those lies to preserve its standing in Washington.

There is an urgent need to develop the highest possible intelligence on the USSR in the shortest possible time.

I had been given some training in my past CIA career to do just this sort of thing ... floating forged newspaper accounts, telegrams, that sort of thing.