Quotes About CIA

Al Qaeda" didn't translate to "the base," as most Western media outlets had so ignorantly reported, but rather, "the database." It referred to the original computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with the help of the CIA to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.

they supposed to do once they got him there?" The CIA operative asked the mobster and then replied, "Apparently, he had his own people there who would get him the rest of the way into Europe.

Scouting is like CIA work and investigative work. You create a lot of stuff and try a lot of stuff. Some works and some doesn't. I try to get creative.

one of the attempts on Lumumba, a CIA scientist was sent to the Congo with a lethal biological virus that was to be used to assassinate Lumumba. However, that plot was never carried out, because they weren't able to come up with "a secure enough agent with the right access".

limiting the CIA's ability to pursue covert operations, and eventually dismantling

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, leading up to its first coup in March 1963, the Ba'th in general, and Saddam Hussein in particular, had relations with the US intelligence services. On the testimony of King Hussein of Jordan, we learn that the CIA collaborated actively with the Ba'th in its coup of March 1963, which led to the killing of thousands of communist opponents.

division of labor within the intelligence community, especially between the NSA and the CIA. In the old days, this division was clear: if information moved, the NSA would intercept it; if it stood still, the CIA would send a spy to nab it. NSA intercepted electrons whooshing through the air or over phone lines; CIA stole documents sitting on a desk or in a vault. The line had been sharply drawn for decades. But in the digital age, the line grew fuzzy.

My CIA colleagues were smart, dedicated, funny, and creative. Yes, there was sometimes stifling bureaucracy, boredom, colleagues who never should have been there, and later, deeply disturbing stories of the CIA's involvement in torture. Still, I got to do work I thought was incredibly important and, many times, had fun doing it.

I give my grandfather, Dr Harold Young, a forestry Professor at the University of Maine, full credit for my career path. He pioneered the use of aerial photography in forestry in the 1950s, and we think he worked as a spy for the CIA during the Cold War, mapping Russian installations.

Hollywood does tend to portray CIA officers as totally the honey trap. Looks matter as they do in any profession. But the most important thing for me when I was working was blending into my environment.

Back when I was a callow youth, if I had known how miserable the hours would be working for the CIA, I would have just told that recruiter to send me in prison instead.

There was no American policy on Afghan politics at the time, only the de facto promotion of Pakistani goals as carried out by Pakistani intelligence. The CIA forecasted repeatedly during this period that postwar Afghanistan was going to be an awful mess; nobody could prevent that. Let the Pakistanis sort out the regional politics. This was their neighborhood.

THE CIA'S THREAT reporting about bin Laden surged that spring to levels the Counterterrorist Center had rarely seen. Tenet thought the threat intelligence from intercepts and human agents was as frightening as he had ever witnessed. Cofer Black said later that he became convinced in the spring that al Qaeda was about to strike hard. He could not tell where, but it seemed to him that the Arabian peninsula and Israel were the most likely targets.

The bin Laden unit's analysts were so intense about their work that they made some of their CIA colleagues uncomfortable. The unit had about twenty-five professionals in the summer of 1999. They called themselves "the Manson Family" because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising al Qaeda threat.

The CIA prepared a briefing paper on July 10 for senior Bush administration officials: "Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that [bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."24

The CIA's job was to tell presidents about dangerous surprises, it was that simple. This led Tenet quickly to the threat of terrorism, missiles, and weapons of mass destruction. Through discussions at the White House he absorbed and then recapitulated Clinton's own emerging obsessions with terrorism and especially biological weapons.

C.I.A. had "a culture of insularity." The attitude they projected was "Nobody should tell us what to do. We got it. We are special

GEORGE TENET WAS AWARE of Osama bin Laden. He supported the small bin Laden tracking unit in the Counterterrorist Center. But by the end of 1997, neither the new CIA director nor the agency placed bin Laden very high on their priority lists. The agency's view of bin Laden remained similar to Prince Turki's: He was a blowhard, a dangerous and wealthy egomaniac, and a financier of other radicals, but he was also isolated in Afghanistan.

Outgoing President Bush, who had served briefly as CIA director during the Ford administration, had been the agency's most attentive White House patron in decades. He invited senior clandestine service officers to Christmas parties and to weekends at Camp David. He drew agency analysts and operators into key decision-making meetings.

President George H. W. Bush and later President Bill Clinton authorized a highly classified program that directed the CIA to buy back as many Stingers as it could from anyone who possessed them.

Known as National Security Decision Directive 166, with an annex classified Top Secret/Codeword, the blueprint they produced became the legal basis for a massive escalation of the CIA's role in Afghanistan, starting in 1985.

President Reagan signed the classified NSDD-166, titled "Expanded U.S. Aid to Afghan Guerrillas," in March 1985, formally anointing its confrontational language as covert U.S. policy in Afghanistan. His national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, signed the highly classified sixteen-page annex, which laid out specific new steps to be taken by the CIA.

Pushed by Casey, American scholars and CIA analysts had begun in the early 1980s to examine Soviet Central Asia for signs of restiveness. There were reports that ethnic Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tajiks, and Kazakhs chafed under Russian ethnic domination. And there were also reports of rising popular interest in Islam, fueled in part by the smuggling of underground Korans, sermonizing cassette tapes, and Islamic texts by the Muslim Brotherhood and other proselytizing networks.

Directorate S seeks to provide a thorough, reliable history of how the C.I.A., I.S.I., and Afghan intelligence agencies influenced the rise of a new war in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and how that war fostered a revival of Al Qaeda, allied terrorist networks, and, eventually, branches of the Islamic State.