Intelligence Manipulation Quotes

People in charge of intelligence are political as well.

The enemy's spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed. Thus they will become double agents and available for our service. It is through the information brought by the double agent that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies. It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.

Good evening. A President who lied us into a war and, in so doing, needlessly killed 3,584 of our family and friends and neighbors; a President whose administration initially tried to destroy the first man to nail that lie; a President whose henchmen then ruined the career of the intelligence asset that was his wife when intelligence assets were never more essential to the viability of the Republic; a President like that has tonight freed from the prospect of prison the only man ever to come to trial for one of the component felonies in what may be the greatest crime of this young century.

Here lies one who knew how to get around him men who were cleverer than himself

What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.

We've never finished the investigation of 9/11 and whether the administration actually misused the intel information it had. The evidence seems pretty clear to me. I've seen that for a long time.

Yes, [I am accusing the CIA of] misleading the Congress of the United States, misleading the Congress of the United States. I am.

In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized.

Under George W. Bush, the politization of intelligence tested new depths …. The pro-war wind that the Bush Administration policy makers had generated … was strong, unrelenting and inescapable.

[Operation] Rockingham was spinning reports and emphasizing reports that showed non-compliance (by Iraq with UN inspections) and quashing those which showed compliance. It was cherry-picking intelligence.

[Have] prayers said – for the people of Cuba suffering under Communist tyranny – in all U.S. military units which have significant numbers of Cuban refugees serving in the U.S. armed forces. Service chaplains and public information officers should team up on this, to assure the event is publicized widely. Cubans should be in the front ranks, where they will loom up in photographs. Defense, in collaboration with CIA, will assure that some photographs of troop units with Cubans in them are passed effectively to Cuban intelligence collectors, with a story of invasion plans sufficiently convincing to cause the Communist regime to begin an alert of the militia (including cane field workers).

Bush and Cheney were not misled by flawed intelligence; they used the flawed intelligence to mislead.

What does 'politicizing intelligence' mean? Using intel, or more often, partial intel, to produce an effect in line with White House policies rather than giving a full picture of a particular situation.

First OSP [Office of Special Plans] supplies false or exaggerated intelligence; then members of the WHIG leak it to friendly reporters, complete with prepackaged vivid imagery; finally, when the story breaks, senior officials point to it as proof and parrot the unnamed quotes they or their colleagues previously supplied.

To make a war, sometimes it is necessary that everyone guess wrong.

I hopes the candidate [Donald Trump] is given fake intelligence briefings ... because you can't trust him.

… the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up..

In intelligence you can justify almost anything you want to if you go about it with enough zeal and effort which is what happened.

The CIA’s intelligence was in many cases simply Bill Casey’s ideology.

Democrats had a secret meeting in Reid's office on Halloween night at 6:15 and they hatched this plot. They said the only way they could get this investigation going was to do it in secret. They say they've been frustrated for a year and a half in getting this investigation into whether the administration twisted the intelligence and they're making no apologies whatsoever for it.

Would it not be much better to have a president who deliberately lied to the people because he thought a war was essential than to have one who was so dumb as to be taken in by intelligence agencies, especially those who told him what he wanted to hear?

The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce.

If you have got high-ranking officials reaching down five levels in the bureaucracy to drag an analyst up to their office to berate them and threaten their jobs because they don't like the conclusions about an intelligence matter, that, in my view, is dangerous.

The Bush administration also was not straightforward about the intelligence it had, releasing tenuous information that fit its goal of attacking Iraq. I feel deceived.

Well, I think there's a distinction between sexing-up the intelligence and sexing-up the presentation of the intelligence.