Cia Reform Quotes

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.

When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.

I’m first to recognize that I don’t think that the CIA should run paramilitary operations…. Rather than destroying everything and starting all over, we ought to take what’s good … and get rid of things beyond the competence of the CIA, then pull things together and make it more effective …. It’ not going to be easy to find a place to put covert operations. It’s very difficult to keep things secret.

As an old man who remembers the intellectual exhilaration and the pleasure of having done good work that characterized the CIA when it was young, I wonder if it might not be better to speak and think in terms of restoring its culture.

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.

I think cleaning house at the CIA needed to happen.

There are three agencies of government that have to be changed. They are the CIA, the FBI and the Draft Boards under General Hershey.

I would disembowel the CIA. It’s contaminated. And if you take half-hearted measures, it will remain contaminated.