Intelligence Analysis Quotes

It [the CIA] was not intended as a Cloak & Dagger Outfit. It was intended merely as a center for keeping the President of what was going on in the World…I never wanted the CIA to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized.

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.

Secrecy is as essential to Intelligence as vestments to a Mass, or darkness to a spiritualist seance, and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.

Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.

I do not believe that reorganization will fix what is wrong with our intelligence community….Failures were caused by performance, not organization.

By the late '70s I had come to question the point of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the CIA's overall charter.

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

I was trained in Army Intelligence, but spent most of my army career in the infantry. But like many people of my generation, I was very much caught up in the Cold War, and books and movies about espionage.

Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.

I know CIA like the back of my hand.

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.

I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.

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

If you walk into the front hallway of the CIA, you will see, on your left, a statue of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan. Bill Donovan was the person who created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was America's spy agency during World War II and then kind of morphed into what's now the CIA.

Every intelligence operation carries risks.

I spent close to a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA and have spent most of my adult life collecting intelligence and protecting sources and methods.

Intelligence collection has its place—no question—… But no matter how important collection is, in the short and even the long run, it just doesn’t cost very much.

America’s military defense capability owes more to the Israeli intelligence input than it does to any other single source of intelligence… it’s value is worth more than five CIAs

The trouble with our intelligence is that we have a bunch of social scientists doing the analysis when the world is dominated by fanatics.

The senior director at the NSC for the Middle East is retired Col. Derek Harvey, an Arabic-speaking intelligence officer with a Ph.D. who served as the head of the U.S. military cell examining the insurgency in Iraq in 2003.

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

One of my own guiding principles in intelligence work was ... not to make a mystery of what is a matter of common knowledge or obvious to friend and foe alike.

People in charge of intelligence are political as well.

The aim of a foreign intelligence service is to find and convince individuals to help them achieve intelligence objectives.