Asha Rangappa Quotes

I learned serving under William J. Casey, that the Clandestine Service is the heart and soul of the agency [the CIA]. It is also the part that can land you in jail.

I've been called a spy of Israel since 1996, and since I made my documentary film in 2000 the FBI has investigated me as an agent of Iraq. The FBI has also opened up an investigation into my wife calling her a KGB spy.

There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn't have got Osama bin Laden - it took us years, but it happened.

Espionage takes place in the world. Even we commit espionage.

Bill Stephenson taught us all we ever knew about foreign intelligence.

Having conducted counterintelligence investigations, I can attest that not everything a foreign intelligence service does is necessarily illegal.

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

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

As a nation we have, over the past seven years, been rebuilding our intelligence with powerful capabilities that many thought we would no longer need after the Cold War. We have been rebuilding our clandestine service, our satellite and other technical collection, our analytical depth and expertise.

I have had national security background, 10 years on the Intelligence Committee, the last two years as chair.

The skills of the British intelligence community are a great national asset.

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.

I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution and capital punishment.

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.

I've always wanted to be a spy, and frankly I'm a little surprised that British intelligence has never approached me.

Spying has always gone on since ancient times.

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

I suddenly realized at the CIA that I had to make life-and-death decisions about people.

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 Abwehr [Nazi-Germany's secret intelligence service] gets better treatment from the FBI than we do.

It would be highly useful to government espionage to have reports from all our bookstores, all our hardware and retail stores, all our drugstores…. What one buys at the hardware and retail stores may furnish clues to potential uses of wires, soap powders, and the like used by criminals.

It was given for all purposes to which a secret service fund should or could be applied to the public benefit—for spies, if the gentleman pleases.

[Wiretapping is] a dirty business…. [Espionage] has been employed by every tribe and state since the beginning of history.

Espionage is largely separate from the mainstream of foreign policy … you nail the spy and you punish him, and you move on.