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.
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 joined the CIA in 1985 as an operations officer in the Clandestine Service.
I'm very interested in soldier recovery projects and in Bradley Manning's story, the army intelligence officer who's being held as a detainee and is going to trial for crimes of treason.
I never threatened him and no Syrian intelligence officer has ever pointed a gun to his head.
I was an intelligence officer, not a policy-maker.
Andrew Warren was a rarity in the CIA's Clandestine Service - African-American, fluent in Arabic, and relatively young for an agent who'd already spent nearly a decade chasing terrorists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria, so deep undercover that few of his friends or family knew the nature of his work.
[On General William Boykin] I hope he's not long for this world.
When I first deployed as a military intelligence officer my resources were a map, a grease pencil and two corporals.
Of all those in the army close to the commander, none is more intimate than the secret agent.
I signed up for military service in the months following 9/11, and later, as a military intelligence officer, I felt called, like so many others, to volunteer for deployment and service in Afghanistan.
I had brought up from Chile a contract agent whose cover was that of a newspaper publisher in Santiago, a young, very talented man, named Dave Phillips, who later on carved quite a career for himself in the agency.
I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.
I'm really happy for [David Petraeus]. He's exceptionally talented.
I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.
George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge
I was a case officer, otherwise known as an operations officer. My role was to go out and convince Al Qaeda operatives to instead work with us as well as to convince people and officials in foreign governments to work on behalf of the U.S. government secretly.
Anyone who tells you he deals with the CIA is either a fool (for admitting it) or a braggart.
The president says, 'What difference does it make what you call the enemy?' Are you kidding me? As an intelligence officer, I would never get away with that. I could never say, 'Well, you know, boss, I don't label this enemy that we're facing.'
I love my career. I thought, if I was lucky, I would retire as a senior intelligence officer, still working on the issues of counterproliferation. But that didn't happen, so - new chapter.
As an intelligence officer, if you don't have a security clearance, you really don't have a job. My military position was, and has been, frozen, for four years.
I'm not in love with David Petraeus. But I think he does present a terrific role model.
I was an intelligence officer for what was then 8th Air Force, B-52 Air Force.
