Sam Donaldson Quotes

An Egyptian newspaper once publicly identified me as the C.I.A. station chief in Cairo. It seemed so stupid at the time. I was only 24, a little young to be a station chief, and, of course, I was never with the C.I.A.

A major theme in all my books is that the CIA is not only the first line of defense but they should also be the first line of offense.

Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.

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.

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

The United States is the only country in the world that has ever released the operations files of its intelligence agency.

Our agency (the Central Intelligence Agency) is the last refuge of organizational privacy available to the U. S. Government.

CIA will not develop operations to penetrate another Government agency, even with the approval of its leadership.

When I blew the whistle on the whole thing, it was [William J.] Casey who, I felt, regarded what I had done as treason.

My CIA colleagues were smart, dedicated, funny, and creative. Yes, there was sometimes stifling bureaucracy, boredom, colleagues who never should have been there, and later, deeply disturbing stories of the CIA's involvement in torture. Still, I got to do work I thought was incredibly important and, many times, had fun doing it.

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.

I would not put C.I.A. officers at risk by asking them to undertake risky, controversial activity again.

First of all, CIA follows the law.

I spent over ten years in the Central Intelligence Agency as an undercover operations officer serving overseas after 9/11 where I carried out covert operations against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, as well as other countries who are 'hostile to liberty,' as I like to say.

We need to make is to strengthen the position of the director of the CIA.

The men and women of the CIA are a national treasure.

You know, as director of the CIA, I got an awful lot of intelligence about all the horrible things that could go on across the world.

When I was younger, I actually wanted to be a CIA agent. Really. I even did the online questionnaire.

Throughout my career, I had the great fortune to experience firsthand as well as to witness what it means to be a CIA officer.

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

The CIA could not face up to the American people and admit that its former employees had conspired to assassinate the President; so from the moment Kennedy's heart stopped beating, the Agency attempted to sweep the whole conspiracy under the rug.

The head of the CIA, it seems to me, would think long and hard before he admitted that former employees of his had been involved in the murder of the President of the United States-even if they weren't acting on behalf of the Agency when they did it.

When I was about, I'd say, 18 or 19 years old, I wanted to be a part of the CIA just because they know those intimate secrets... So I was just always into knowing. I like to know things.

I've always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts.

From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'