Alexander Joel Quotes

Secrecy now beclouds everything about CIA—its cost, its efficiency, its successes, and its failures.

Secrecy is as essential to Intelligence as vestments to a Mass, or darkness to a spiritualist seance, and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.

The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.

In the 1990s, human intelligence gathering was seriously neglected.

SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.

One of my own guiding principles in intelligence work was ... not to make a mystery of what is a matter of common knowledge or obvious to friend and foe alike.

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

Secrecy now beclouds everything about the Central Intelligence Agency—its cost, its efficiency, its success, its failures.

It’s [the CIA] an organization that thrives on deception. How do you manage an organization like that?

Nobody [at the CIA] had any idea of who was doing what where

Our foreign intelligence was little more than what a military attache could learn at dinner.

Bureau of Secret Intelligence.

I first learned the power of trust in the CIA. There is no question that when I joined the Agency as a covert operations officer, it was still run along the 'old boys' network' model.

I never worked for any secret service, certainly not the Israeli secret service.

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

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.

For an old spy and codebreaker like myself, nothing in the world happens by coincidence.

It will be the CIA's mission and my own if confirmed to ensure that the agency remains the best in the world at its core mission - collecting what our enemies do not want us to know. In short, the CIA must be the world's premier espionage organization.

That’s the thing about spies. Most of the secrets we keep are from each other.

[I will] totally dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, nail by nail, brick by brick

It is a little-known fact about covert operations that you will spend a lot of time with people you can’t really trust. They may be traitors and liars. We call them assets or informants. But mostly, in those days, I called him Zach.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.

You couldn't trust anyone or anything that belonged to the world of espionage.

Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity; They cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness; Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports; Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of warfare; If a secret piece of news is divulged by a spy before the time is ripe, he must be put to death together with the man to whom the secret was told.

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