Clandestine Ops Quotes

I wouldn't even know - and I spent three years in the CIA - I wouldn't even know how you'd start a covert action program in a place like Iran. It would be extraordinarily difficult.

We have the ability to take him out and the time has come to exercise that ability…a few covert operators can do the job.

The Special Operations community is rooted in unconventional warfare.

The members of the National Clandestine Service of the CIA are called the collectors of last resort. They are tasked to seek the truth when all other avenues of intelligence collection have failed.

I've always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

In covert action you always have to think of the endgame before you start it. We didn’t always do that.

Civil Cooperation Bureau

It is the nature of covert activities to be controversial.

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.

The ISI is above all a paramilitary organization. It doesn't do all that much collection of intelligence. It's not a very good spy agency, but it's good at running covert action.

But I will say this: In my humble opinion, knowing nothing about it, I do believe that they have remote viewers working on where Osama Bin Laden is. I absolutely, 100%, convinced of that.

Even we schoolchildren know that ordinary diplomats don't drive around in unmarked cars carrying Glock pistols.

How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?

It doesn't take long to become aware of the presence of the CIA in Laos.

Clandestine intelligence operations involve a constant breaking of all the rules.. To put it baldly, such operations are extra legal and sometimes illegal.

Tact ops is a unit which breaks into homes and offices to plant bugging devices. They get into mafia hangouts, they go into embassies, they go into terrorist hangouts, and they describe themselves as court-sanctioned burglars.

At the secret CIA training facility called 'The Farm,' aspiring case-officers learn how to recruit spies and steal secrets. As a former CIA officer, this is where I was taught that in order to successfully recruit an asset, I must first understand what would motivate an individual to cooperate with the CIA in the first place.

[After Vietnam] the type of interventions that are carried out are designed so as not to elicit public reactions.

Without a clear picture of where the military's covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world.