Quotes About CIA

The CIA's covert operations were by and large blind stabs in the dark. The agency's only course was to learn by doing—by making mistakes in battle. The CIA then concealed its failures abroad, lying to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. It told those lies to preserve its standing in Washington. The truth, said Don Gregg, a skilled cold-war station chief, was that the agency at the height of its powers had a great reputation and a terrible record.

As the technology of espionage expanded its horizons, the CIA's vision grew more and more myopic. Spy satellites enabled it to count Soviet weapons. They did not deliver the crucial information that communism was crumbling. The CIA's foremost experts never saw the enemy until after the cold war was over.

On August 21, Robert Kennedy asked McCone if the CIA could stage a phony attack on the American military base at Guantánamo Bay as a pretext for an American invasion of Cuba. McCone demurred.

Bush casually pronounced a political death sentence upon the CIA in 2004 when he said that the agency was "just guessing" about the course of the war in Iraq. No president had ever publicly dismissed the CIA that way.

almost every president, almost every Congress, and almost every director of central intelligence since the 1960s has proved incapable of grasping the mechanics of the CIA. Most have left the agency in worse shape than they found it. Their failures have handed future generations, in the words of President Eisenhower, "a legacy of ashes." We are back where we began sixty years ago, in a state of disarray.

The target was destroyed. But the CIA had misread its maps. The building was not Milosevic's military depot. It was the Chinese embassy.

The CIA falsely claimed credit for the arrest and wrested back control of the interrogation. Its officers blasted the prisoner with noise, froze him with cold, and buried him in a mock coffin. Soufan and Gaudin protested. The CIA officers told them the techniques had been approved at the highest levels of the American government. Soufan

I was much less offended than others were by the CIA's interrogations in the years after September 11.

I never one time mentioned anything to any coach about retirement or joining the CIA or anything like that.

When I was younger, I actually wanted to be a CIA agent. Really. I even did the online questionnaire.

Well look, CIA is an agency that has to collect intelligence, do operations. We have to take risks and it's important that we take risks and that we know that we have the support of the government and we have the support of the American people in what we're doing.

I first learned the power of trust in the CIA. There is no question that when I joined the Agency as a covert operations officer, it was still run along the 'old boys' network' model.

I joined the CIA in 1985 as an operations officer in the Clandestine Service.

This is systems security for the Central Intelligence Agency. We would like to know why you are attempting to hack one of our classified databases.

One final bit of advice. The next time a senior administrator of the CIA tells you she has a national-security crisis ... Leave the bullshit in Cambridge.

FACT: In 1991, a document was locked in the safe of the director of the CIA. The document is still there today. Its cryptic text includes references to an ancient portal and an unknown location underground. The document also contains the phrase "It's buried out there somewhere.

In a military maneuver worthy of the CIA, Pope Clement issued secret sealed orders to be opened simultaneously by his soldiers all across Europe on Friday, October 13 of 1307.

I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of [CIA] sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors.

Funnily enough, Paul was in his work because he liked people. He'd seen the CIA take such incredible shit over the years and save so many damn lives. The Company could not defend herself, not without giving away secrets she was bound to keep. So she just took it. He'd seen the effects of all the Company bashing in his own life.

And even if you're right, the CIA paid millions of dollars to men trying to kill goats by staring at them," I said.

Well look, CIA is an agency that has to collect intelligence, do operations. We have to take risks and it's important that we take risks and that we know that we have the support of the government and we have the support of the American people in what we're doing.

You know, as director of the CIA, I got an awful lot of intelligence about all the horrible things that could go on across the world.

In examining the CIA's past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public.

In the case of Pakistan, the CIA actually used a fake vaccination campaign to try to locate Osama bin Laden, so now vaccination is associated with espionage.