Colin Powell Quotes

Thinking back, I now wonder if our mistake may have been in not considering whether the reason Saddam Hussein was so secretive about his weapons of mass destruction capabilities was not because he had the weapons and wanted to conceal them, but because he did not have them and he wanted to hide that.

The people at the NSA aren't trying to ruin your life. They're not trying to put you in authoritarian dystopia. These are normal people trying to do good work in hard circumstances.

Spies could be invaluable in peacetime, once the fighting actually started, their value dropped steeply. When the swords were out, it was the information your own scouts provided that mattered, not reports from unknown people whose veracity you couldn't prove.

Military intelligence interrogators, however, their goal is to get information, to save lives, to stop the war, to find Saddam - whatever the information is going to be used for, at whatever cost.

It's hard for me to imagine that some people in the CIA who had firsthand knowledge would be unable to recognize that this would be helpful information for a soldier's death.

I strongly support the call to greatly expand our human intelligence capability to penetrate al Qaeda and gather critical intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks on our homeland.

But by providing the background picture - the universal situational awareness that we desire - by showing the anomalies, the Space-Based Radar will change the nature of how we do our analysis and our intelligence.

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.

Of all those in the army close to the commander none is more intimate than the secret agent; of all rewards none more liberal than those given to secret agents; of all matters none is more confidential than those relating to secret operations.

Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.

During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.

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.

Human intelligence trumps electronic or signals intelligence every time.

It was pretty clear in 2002 to anyone in the intelligence community that is where we were headed.[To war with Iraq].

Intelligence, like any other aspect of national security, has to be under civilian control.

The Pentagon suffers from too much Intelligence. They can't use what they get because there is too much collected. It would almost be better if they didn't have it because it's difficult to find out what's important.

The manner in which intelligence indicators were handled in the Cuba situation may well be the most serious flaw in our intelligence system, and one which, if uncorrected, could lead to the gravest consequences

When I first deployed as a military intelligence officer my resources were a map, a grease pencil and two corporals.

America’s military defense capability owes more to the Israeli intelligence input than it does to any other single source of intelligence… it’s value is worth more than five CIAs

We were bereft of any human intelligence—zero, nada, in terms of agents on the ground…. We had no answers.

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.

Bulk collection of phone records didn't find or stop the Tsarnaev brothers from the massacre in Boston. In fact, one might argue that all of the money spent on bulk collection takes money away from human analysts that might have noticed the older brother's trip to become radicalized in Chechnya.

Most people don't know what goes on in the intelligence services. Certainly I had very little idea what went on in GCHQ. For me it was a job, a chance to use my languages.

My personal sources in the intelligence community and the military are very good. They're excellent. I have very high-up, in-depth sources.

Within the Intelligence Community, CIA is the keeper of the human intelligence mission. Technical forms of collection are vital, but a good human source is unique and can deliver decisive intelligence on our adversaries' secrets - even their intent.