Quotes About CIA

I think, honestly, my largest concern, there are a lot of unbalanced people out there, and all of a sudden, I'm the CIA poster girl, and our home in Washington, the front door was about 20 feet from the street. I went to the agency at a certain point and asked for security on a residence.

Any time you're a poster child for the CIA, there are a lot of people that are - either have ideological or they are mentally unbalanced - that are going to try to find you and perhaps cause you harm.

When I came to the CIA in the mid-'90s, our graduating class of case officers was unbelievably low. Now, after years of rebuilding, our training programs and putting our best efforts to recruit the most talented men and women, we are graduating more clandestine officers than at any time in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The most cost-effective move we could make in defense spending would be to shift the focus of CIA operations, giving this agency the directive to make trouble for the Soviet Union.

Director of the CIA was aware of a terrorist group's plan to bomb the Washington, D.C., metro system. He let the bombing occur, in order to gain congressional approval for the use of extreme measures against that group.

My CIA godfather told me he'd never heard any American speak Japanese so well.

I was with the CIA for only three years. I worked in the Directorate of Operations, which is now called the National Clandestine Service. It's the part of the organization where the spies live. I didn't have much experience beyond the training.

The CIA in real life, we know, is looking for new kinds of cover. It's looking for new platforms, as they like to say, and it's trying to use the revolution in communications technology, the ability to use all sorts of corporate entities in ways that are hard to detect to get our spies in the places where they need to be.

From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'

CIA types are so into deceit, deception, double and triple crosses, paranoia, and bullshit, that you never knew what they knew

Hollis considered the irony in this. American Jews were once thought politically unreliable by the CIA.

If I were to give you a list of names of the people, world political figures, who have been assisted by the CIA, and even assisted to office around the world, you'd be astonished and probably wouldn't believe it. But it's very long, and the names are very distinguished.

As a former CIA operative, I have seen first-hand that not every nation we buy energy from has America's best interest in mind.

The secrecy that surrounds any CIA operation makes complete documentation impossible, but the fragmentary information that is now available permits identification of several important examples.

The mindless voters of this country are wrong to worry about the dangers of the CIA's internal corruption. When they bring this nation to disaster, it won't be through their villainy; it will be because of their bungling.

The CIA, an agency designed to operate outside the law, was now free to pursue its vision of a new world, to create new geographies, and to keep that world's details far from the public record. The black world was supercharged with newfound life and purpose.

One theory holds that the CIA has spotted them already but the information is being withheld until it is ruled out that they are hoarding weapons of mass destruction like blowpipes.)

The CIA had no doubt that the weapons were there, while the Pentagon was unsure whether the capacity to make them even existed. It was as if the intelligence analysts were saying that they were confident that Saddam's wife was ready to give birth, but remained uncertain if she was pregnant.

faces were familiar: CIA director Irene Kennedy, who had recruited him as a kid;

The CIA also maintains countless paramilitary and pseudobusiness organizations that weave in and out of legitimacy and do business much as their civilian counterparts would.

From 1945 through the crucial years of 1954 and 1955 and on to 1964, almost everything that was done in South Vietnam, including even a strong role in the selection of generals and ambassadors, was the action of the CIA, with the DOD playing a supporting role and the Department of State almost in total eclipse.

The CIA uses its intelligence role as a cover mechanism for its operational activities. Furthermore it uses its own secret intelligence as an initiator for its own secret operations.

President Truman planned for the CIA to be the "quiet intelligence arm of the President." He and those of his Administration never intended that it become an autonomous operational agency in the clandestine field.

They can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they are able to operate under the canopy of an ever-present "enemy" called "Communism." And then, to top all of this, there is the fact that the CIA has assumed the right to generate and direct secret operations.