Intelligence Agencies, Intelligence Agents, Intelligence Analysts Quotes

Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.

The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.

Accountability goes hand in hand with reform.

Intelligence work has one moral law—it is justified by results.

The only remaining superpower doesn’t have enough interest in what’s going on in the world to organize and run an espionage service.

Trump doesn't have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence agencies, arms companies, big foreign money, are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves.

There is no fear exception to the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.

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

Are there topics of sufficient import to the nation's well-being to replace the Soviets as the focus of U.S. intelligence?

Abolish the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The CIA claims that secrecy is necessary to hide what it's doing from enemies of the United States ... the real reason for secrecy is to hide what the CIA is doing from the American people.

Our foreign intelligence was little more than what a military attache could learn at dinner.

If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America's vast intelligence infrastructure.

Any time there is a coup you start with the assumption that the home government missed it …. Why should we know better than the government that’s being overthrown?

When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the toughest: In a political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life, could American intelligence continue to survive and succeed? That jury is still out.

Intelligence is about lies. If something is legal and above board, you would not need the CIA to do it.

In some ways, the best novel about terrorism, though it's not a novel, is 'The Looming Tower' by Lawrence Wright or 'Perfect Soldiers' by Terry McDermott.

Only enemies of the Soviet Union can think of the KGB as some kind of secret police.

I want to stand up and cheer until I realize what he told me was all the great things about my privacy except that he really told me between the lines is that he is going to continue to collect all my private records without a warrant.

The CIA and NSA are not supposed to be involved in American law enforcement.

American political elites feel very empowered to criticize the American intelligence community for not doing enough when they feel in danger, and as soon as we've made them feel safe again, they feel equally empowered to complain that we're doing too much.

The KGB is by far the world's largest, the Israeli probably the best, and the Iranian and the South Korean the deadliest.

There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.

One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.

Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.