Quotes About Intelligence

Donovan told the president that he could learn the "capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign nations" while running "subversive operations abroad" against America's enemies.

They were appalled by his idea of making a spy service out of a scattershot collection of Wall Street brokers, Ivy League eggheads, soldiers of fortune, ad men, news men, stunt men, second-story men, and con men.

The OSS had developed a uniquely American cadre of intelligence analysts, but Donovan and his star officer, Allen W. Dulles, were enthralled by espionage and sabotage, skills at which Americans were amateurs. Donovan depended on British intelligence to school his men in the dark arts. The bravest of the OSS, the ones who inspired legends, were the men who jumped behind enemy lines, running guns, blowing up bridges, plotting against the Nazis with the French and the Balkan resistance movements.

Freeh infuriated the White House almost every day for more than seven years. One case among many was the FBI's immense investigation into allegations that China's intelligence services had bought political influence at the White House through illegal campaign contributions.

But Freeh's FBI managed to bury the fact that its most highly valued source on Chinese espionage in the United States, a politically wired California woman named Katrina Leung, had been spying for China throughout the 1980s and 1990s. All the while, she was having sex with the special agent in charge of her case, a top supervisor of the FBI's China Squad, James J. Smith—and occasionally with a leading FBI counterintelligence expert on China, William Cleveland.

Truman said he only needed a daily intelligence digest to keep from having to read a two-foot stack of cables every morning.

But no one wanted to embarrass the Bureau. The case festered for years. Not until after Freeh's departure was it clear that the Chinese, Russian, and Cuban intelligence services all had penetrated the FBI in the 1990s. So had a member of the world's most dangerous and least-known terrorist organization. His name was Ali Mohamed. Al-Qaeda had a double agent posing as an informer for the FBI.

It takes 5 to 7 years to turn a novice into a case officer capable of working in the capitals of the world.

Under Cheney's direction, the United States moved to restore the powers of secret intelligence that had flourished for fifty-five years under J. Edgar Hoover. In public speeches, the president, the vice president, and the attorney general renewed the spirit of the Red raids. In top secret orders, they revived the techniques of surveillance that the FBI had used in the war on communism. The

Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law.

The other day we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah," President Bush said at a Republican fund-raiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, on April 9. "He's one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States. He's not plotting and planning anymore. He's where he belongs.

The United States did little in direct response to Putin's war on truth. "We had a massive information gap," Ambassador Nuland said. "We didn't have the kind of intelligence assets where we could prove that he was lying about Russian involvement.

Today an old torpedo factory not far from the Pentagon houses eight miles of microfilm, a small part of the archive of American intelligence from the war.

As President Bush made the case for a wider war against Iraq in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, he called the six men in Lackawanna an al-Qaeda cell. The FBI would conclude that this was not true.

She also had run Stellar Wind since its inception. Mueller made her his right hand.

As a report released by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee put it, the Russians sought to "blur the lines between reality and fiction, erode our trust in media entities and the information environment, in government, in each other, and in democracy itself." It took years before Americans understood this.

Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence

It's amazing how someone's IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.

Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition." —W.H. Auden

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world. —CALVIN, from Calvin and Hobbes

Must-watch documentary The Gatekeepers (2012)

Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid. —HEINRICH HEINE,

There is a big difference between intelligence and wisdom. Many are fooled into thinking they are the same thing, but they are not. I have seen intelligent serial killers, but I've never seen a wise one.