Secret Activities Quotes
Intelligence agents tend to prefer covert activities to the less dramatic, non-exciting, activity of gathering and analyzing intelligence. Most national intelligence services tend to enlarge their portfolio to include covert activities regardless of what the national leaders intended. Because of the secrecy, they can often get away with this.
The United States is the only nation that overtly defines covert activity in its legal system. It makes these very subtle distinctions which seemed to many intelligence leaders like Lowenthal a distinction without much of a difference and an attempt by our democracy to make moral and legal distinctions so the dirty parts of the business of espionage seems consistent with an open democracy.
The American Embassy in Berlin had wiretapped the telephone and telegraph wires of the German Foreign Ministry. The man who did that was hired by Secretary of State Lansing as the first employee of the new unit.
He was referring to the testimony given before the Senate of James R. Clapper, U. S. Director of National Intelligence. He denied that the NSA was collecting data on millions of American communications. Then Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was capturing data on ALL U. S. phone calls and e-mails. See {634917} for details on the false testimony.
