Intelligence Secrecy Quotes

An intelligence service is the ideal vehicle for a conspiracy [against its own government]. Its members can travel about at home and abroad under secret orders, and no questions are asked. Every scrap of paper in the files, its membership, its expenditure of funds, its contacts, even enemy contacts, are state secrets.

Fewer than a dozen Members of Congress have any idea how much money the CIA spends each year, and probably none of them has much of an idea what the Agency actually does with that money.

As I have said in the past, revealing specific targets or successes of U.S. intelligence activities is not in the public interest.

The head of the CIA, it seems to me, would think long and hard before he admitted that former employees of his had been involved in the murder of the President of the United States-even if they weren't acting on behalf of the Agency when they did it.

It's hardly a news flash that a secret, clandestine intelligence agency might resist giving out information about its operations when not not legally required to do so.

The Snowden leaks did cause damage.

I don't want to talk about intelligence matters. I will say, however, that intelligence-community estimates should not become public in the way of this city and in the way of Congress.

Anyone who tells you he deals with the CIA is either a fool (for admitting it) or a braggart.

If you stop one terror attack in the U.S., it may be connected to multiple other plots out there that are connected. If you reveal that you stopped one plot, it may tip our hand.

The notion that -- which some people are trying to suggest, that by asking for the identity of an American person, that is the same as leaking it, is completely false. There's no equivalence between so-called unmasking and leaking.