Zbigniew Brzezinski Quotes

George Tenet has been the director of central intelligence since 1997, time enough to have changed the Agency's culture. He has failed. He should go.

The intelligence failures with respect to Iraq were massive and have damaged our credibility around the world.

The Committee's review of a series of intelligence shortcomings, to include intelligence prior to 9/11 and the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, clearly reveal how vital a diverse intelligence workforce is to our national security.

Our intelligence community needs better coordination of operations and exchange of information, and that's why we need an overall director of national intelligence and a national counterterrorism center.

I do have concerns about the current efforts to restructure our nation's intelligence community.

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

I do not believe that reorganization will fix what is wrong with our intelligence community….Failures were caused by performance, not organization.

Intelligence is a sacred cow. We’ve done nothing since we’ve been here about it. The CIA isn’t worth a damn.

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

There has been a culture of misinformation among the intelligence leadership.

… policy has shaped intelligence more than vice versa.

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

We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap.

I don't want to talk about intelligence matters. I will say, however, that intelligence-community estimates should not become public in the way of this city and in the way of Congress.

One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community, and especially the counterterrorism community, is to assume if someone hasn't attacked us, it's because he can't or because we've defeated him.

It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.

My experience is the White House is not a very good place to coordinate intelligence, much less to integrate it.

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.

I believe that reforming our intelligence community is one of the most important things that we can do in order to ensure that our country is in fact safer, stronger and wiser.

While the intelligence profession oftentimes demands secrecy, it is critically important that there be a full and open discourse on intelligence matters with the appropriate elected representatives of the American people.

There should be a mass purge of the CIA for incompetence…. There were 3,000 people killed on September 11, and not a single CIA operative has been fired. They missed that; they missed the weapons of mass destruction.

You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the nature of the intelligence business.

Directors of Central Intelligence are supposed to steer clear of policy.

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

An issue that really concerned me when I was on the House Intelligence Committee was the quality of analysis.