Intelligence Failure Quotes

The claims made about Iraq's WMD capabilities before the invasion were inaccurate, wrong, and in some cases, deliberately misleading.

I regret that the presentation I made at the UN turned out to be wrong. It was wrong on the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, but pretty much right on intentions and capabilities.

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.

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

Could it be that all those reports coming from our own intelligence that Bush ignored was right all along? Could it be that the UN was right all along?

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

The CIA is an incompetent bureaucracy, generally.

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?

I go back and think of President Kennedy, who had a military service background, but he comes into the presidency, and he's faced with a decision on the Bay of Pigs, with the C.I.A. and the military giving him data, and it turns out very badly.

The CIA … concealed its failures abroad, lying to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. It told those lies to preserve its standing in Washington.

The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.

The Agency became so wrapped up in the military operation that it failed to appraise the chances of success realistically. Furthermore, it failed to keep the national policymakers adequately and realistically informed of the conditions considered essential for success.

In the aftermath of September 11, and as the 9/11 Commission report so aptly demonstrates, it is clear that our intelligence system is not working the way that it should.

I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could — with 100 per cent certainty — know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.

I don’t think we should be selling statues of Nathan Hale at the International Spy Museum. First of all, it was an operation against our allies, the British, but most important, it failed.

Louis Freeh said on national TV that actionable intelligence could have allowed us to stop the hijackings.

In the late 1980s, the United States and Israel believed that they had good intelligence on Iraq, but they missed the extent of Saddam Hussein's pursuit of unconventional weapons - until after he invaded Kuwait.

But what if our intelligence is wrong?

Despite the obvious intelligence and security failures that contributed to the attack against the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, the reality is that in one night, an al Qaeda-affiliated group destroyed a diplomatic post, killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, and forced an end to clandestine U.S. activity in the area.

Richard M. Helms, the first director of Central Intelligence to rise from the ranks, was fond of saying that the CIA had been founded to make sure that there would never be another Pearl Harbor. Underlying this mission impossible was the wishful supposition that an America that knew everything could prevent anything.

Putin is an uneducated, unintelligent, uncultured man who has no plan.

The manner in which intelligence indicators were handled in the Cuba situation may well be the most serious flaw in our intelligence system, and one which, if uncorrected, could lead to the gravest consequences

Thinking back, I now wonder if our mistake may have been in not considering whether the reason Saddam Hussein was so secretive about his weapons of mass destruction capabilities was not because he had the weapons and wanted to conceal them, but because he did not have them and he wanted to hide that.

Democracy has not failed; the intelligence of the race has failed before the problems the race has raised