Raymond Kelly Quotes

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

The intelligence community really is a vast bureaucratic entity, and it has been politicized in ways that are not effective for the gathering of intelligence and giving it to senior policymakers.

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 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.

The Homeland Security department doesn't have tasking authority in the intelligence community. They can ask for stuff, but they can't direct anything except inside their bureau.

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

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.

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.

You want to keep intelligence separate from policy.

The 9/11 commission recommended the appointment of a national intelligence director with budgetary authority to better coordinate the work of the intelligence community and resolve differences.

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.

I'm the chairman of the intelligence committee. We don't only get formal briefings, but we collect our information from the intelligence community in a variety of ways.

Policymakers have to make judgments based on the best intelligence they get.

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.

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

My husband [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] always said the President of the United States had the best information in the world on which to base the government's decisions as to policy in foreign relations. Part of this was because of the efficiency of the intelligence reports he received. Over the past few years, however, the CIA has become an agency not for gathering information and reporting it to those who make policy and take action, but it has itself made policy and taken action. And by so doing it has involved the government in situations from which no administration could quickly extricate itself.

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

There are times when the Central Intelligence Agency makes policy by default.

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.

We have 17 different intelligence agencies and they are all basic;ly doing the same thing.

As an intelligence analyst you have to tell the president what you know, what you think you know and what you don’t know.

People in charge of intelligence are political as well.