Quotes About CIA

I spent over 10 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, serving overseas, serving in the Middle East. And let me tell you, if you're a terrorist and you want to come to the United States, the worst possible way to do it is as a refugee. You'll go through a year and a half to two years of vetting.

Despite CIA rhetoric that gave Phoenix a sanitized, technical patina, the program soon devolved into an exercise in brutality that produced many casualties and few verifiable results.

The CIA agent looked more dead than alive. Alex wondered if he had been hit, but there was no sign of any blood. Perhaps he was in shock.

I was working for the CIA and prohibited from speaking publicly.

First of all, CIA follows the law.

Rove and his attorneys can parse the words all they want, but it is now clear that while Rove may not have given a reporter Plame's name, he clearly identified her by telling the reporter that Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA agent.

I don't think anybody ever thought about the CIA meddling in internal affairs. The shock of the President's death called for an immediate investigation. It actually lay in the jurisdiction of Texas.

A major theme in all my books is that the CIA is not only the first line of defense but they should also be the first line of offense.

Then he released on Cuban television an astonishing eleven-part documentary entitled La Guerra de la CIA contra Cuba—The CIA's War against Cuba. Cuban intelligence, it turned out, had filmed and recorded everything the CIA had been doing in their country for at least ten years—as if they were creating a reality show. Survivor: Havana Edition.

Although the FBI and later the 9/11 Commission ultimately stated that the money was not intentionally being diverted to fund terrorists,9 investigators were surprised to discover how lax the safeguards at Riggs Bank were,10 especially as the bank was known to have close links to the CIA.11

Treatment for malignancies had become only a little better than the tortures of a CIA black site.

The CIA laid out several scenarios and said life could be lousy, life could be OK, life could be better, and they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like.

Most people will be surprised (and horrified) to know that the epigraph for this chapter was taken from a quote found in a 1960 CIA study on brainwashing. The full quote is: "We know now that men can be made to do exactly anything.…It's all a question of finding the right means. If only we take enough trouble and go sufficiently slowly, we can make him kill his aged parents and eat them in a stew."1

Information obtained from detainees at Guantanamo has been described by the CIA as 'the lead information' that enabled the agency to recognize the importance of a courier for Usama bin Laden, a crucial understanding that led to Bin Laden's secret hideout in Pakistan and the U.S. raid that killed him.

Richard M. Helms, the first director of Central Intelligence to rise from the ranks, was fond of saying that the CIA had been founded to make sure that there would never be another Pearl Harbor. Underlying this mission impossible was the wishful supposition that an America that knew everything could prevent anything.

For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy making arm of the government.

It's lonely. That's why, in many ways, the CIA is the world's biggest dating agency, I think. I imagine it's much like two actors that get married because they understand that universe. You know, I'm pretty sure the agency's divorce rate is rather high.

I would be a terrible CIA officer in real life.

It is very important that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency adhere to the same classification guidelines that all employees must adhere to because there are very good reason for those classification guidelines.

When I was director of the CIA, I knew that we had been - and I'm choosing my words very carefully here - effective in our expansion. We really had - expansion of government agencies and expansion of use of contractors. Effective, we were; efficient, we weren't. And so, as director of the CIA, I went after the inefficiencies part.

Because of the terrorist threat, the FBI and CIA have become as important as the military in preserving our freedom. Yet while thanking our military is standard practice in American life, no one thinks of thanking the FBI, the CIA, or the rest of the intelligence community for keeping us safe since 9/11.

Argentina has elected a centre-right president, Mauricio Macri. Bolivia's Evo Morales, having lost a referendum that would have allowed him a fourth presidential term, spends his time muttering about CIA plots and issuing threats to jail journalists who persist in reporting influence-peddling scandals. The economy is a sputtering shambles.

People often ask CIA Directors what keeps them up at night. Between rogue WMD programs, cyber threats, terrorist organizations, great power rivalries, and other global threats, there's bound to be more than a single reason I'm losing sleep on any given night.

I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.'s disposal for some very risky missions. But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.