Top 125 CIA Quotes

There are some classified documents there that we received from the CIA. Our arrangement with the CIA was that we could by mutual agreement declassify these documents, but we had no authority to unilaterally declassify them.

I never write about CIA conspiracies or the FBI or mafia or anything like that because I just don’t understand that world. But I think I do understand individual human harmfulness.

I’ve often found, as I did with ‘Bourne,’ where I was inspired by the events of Iran-Contra when I designed the CIA for the ‘Bourne’ franchise, that the reality of how things work is usually more compelling than the superficial, made-up version that Hollywood sometimes does.

We need to make is to strengthen the position of the director of the CIA.

It would certainly be interesting to know what the CIA knew about Oswald six weeks before the assassination, but the contents of this particular message never reached the Warren Commission and remain a complete mystery.

I had no concerns – I had no reason to have concerns based on what was available to me about North‘s contacts with the private sector people, but I didn’t think a CIA person should do it.

If the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were private companies and were chronically unable to accomplish one of their key missions, their shareholders would have long ago revolted, fired their management, and their stock would be trading at values near zero.

Reasonable people can disagree about the authorities the NSA should have, when it’s appropriate for the CIA to use drone strikes, and how assertive U.S. foreign policy and intelligence should be.

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.

Whether you are on the left or the right, we should all agree that organized human smugglers are putting innocent lives at risk. As a former undercover officer in the CIA, I am appalled that we are not maximizing the use of intelligence to deny and disrupt these transnational smuggling networks.

One might oppose the CIA program, but Abu Ghraib it ain’t.

Problems in our country haven‘t been caused by Donald Trump, America and its ambitions or CIA spies. Our problems are rooted in a bad government system, the lack of free elections, independent courts and freedom of speech.

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.

The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about.

Even when I was at CIA, I’d go to visit foreign leaders and I’d say, ‘You know, I’m not a diplomat. I’m just an old CIA guy’… I said, ‘If I wanted to be diplomatic, I’d have been a diplomat.’

Who better to help formulate and to lead debate on fighting ISIS and Islamic extremists than an Arabic-speaking former CIA case officer who has been fighting the war on terrorism?

I spent almost a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA. I was the guy in the back alleys at four o’clock in the morning collecting intelligence on threats to the Homeland.

The Panetta/Petraeus combo is a powerful tandem. I’ve seen both of them up close and personal at the CIA and in Iraq.

None of us, remember, knew that 9/11 was gonna happen. We didn’t live in a state of anxiety and fear about Osama Bin Laden. The CIA might have, and they failed to prevent it. But the general public didn’t have any knowledge. Now we have knowledge of it, and it’s a very clear and present danger in our lives.

Just this week, Syria broke off all relations with the United States military and the CIA.

I’m going to be so much better a president for having been at the CIA that you’re not going to believe it.

George Tenet was actually a very strong centralizing force. If you met George by personality, George met with the president six days out of seven: nontrivial attribute inside the federal government. And George was head of the CIA.

When at the CIA, I was fond of saying that many jihadis join the movement for the same reasons that young Americans join the Crips and the Bloods: youthful alienation, the need to belong to something greater than self, the search for meaningful identity. But it also matters what gang you join.

CIA has learned some tough lessons, especially when asked to tackle missions that fall outside our expertise.

I examined a lot of CIA declassified UFO files, which are fascinating, because there was a huge UFO craze going on in America. There still is today, but it certainly started in ’47. And by the ’50s, it was in full force.

If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on – it’s all the same.

Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don’t know what’s going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime that’s not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA.

The main points were: one, the amount of Israel‘s nuclear weapons, how many Israel had, that no one could predict or know, including the CIA. They were thinking about a number like 10 or 15. But I came out with a number between 150 to 200.

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

In recent years, anyone in the government, certainly anyone in the FBI or the CIA, or recently, in again, Clint’s film, In the Line of Fire, the main bad guy is the chief advisor to the president.

The original judgment of the FBI, the Secret Service, and the CIA was that there were three shots. I don’t think that convinced us except as a statement by people, many of them who were familiar with ballistics. This question troubled me greatly.

When you keep telling yourself a lie, at some point you buy your own cover story, like a CIA spy or something.

Before I was elected to represent southwestern Texas in the U.S. Congress, I spent almost a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA. I served in places where Russia has geopolitical interests, and learned that Russia has one simple goal: to erode trust in democratic institutions.

Of course we wish that more people involved in the leak of my true CIA identity had been prosecuted, but the system worked.

The disaster at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedy‘s doubts about listening to advisers from the CIA, the Pentagon, or the State Department who had misled him or allowed him to accept lousy advice.

I would be a terrible CIA officer in real life.

Within the Intelligence Community, CIA is the keeper of the human intelligence mission. Technical forms of collection are vital, but a good human source is unique and can deliver decisive intelligence on our adversaries‘ secrets – even their intent.

I thought I was done making CIA movies after ‘The Bourne Identity.’ I really had used my father‘s work in Iran-Contra on ‘The Bourne Identity.’ You get one experience like that in your life where you have personal exposure to something, and you put it in a movie. That’s it.

Over the years, from serving in the CIA to sitting on non-profit boards, I have observed first-hand what the addition of even one woman to a meeting or to a decision-making body can do. Put simply, in very many instances, group dynamics improve markedly.

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 could not face up to the American people and admit that its former employees had conspired to assassinate the President; so from the moment Kennedy’s heart stopped beating, the Agency attempted to sweep the whole conspiracy under the rug.

The CIA’s drone campaign is extraordinarily effective, and the agency is getting progressively better at targeting senior leaders and disrupting their networks.

When a political advocacy network hires a former CIA analyst and starts tailing save-our-parks activists, you know there’s something terribly dangerous happening to our democracy.

I would not restart, under any circumstances, an interrogation program at CIA.

Proud parents document the arrival and growth of their future CIA officer in all forms of social media that the world can access for decades to come.

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

As a former CIA case officer, I recognize that the rapid rise of firms like Huawei and ZTE presents a significant national security threat to the telecom infrastructure of the United States and our allies.

I wrote a letter to the CIA on my manual college typewriter. I mailed it to CIA with my resume. I didn’t have an address. So I just put, ‘CIA. Washington, D.C.’

I play DEA, CIA, FBI, LAPD; I got ’em all.

From my time at the CIA to my time in the House, I’ve dedicated my career to protecting our democracy and ensuring it works for all of us.

The CIA will only hire people with impeccable credentials to be a translator. ‘Impeccable credentials’ means you’ve never lived outside the United States.

The bottom line is that the CIA knew before the war, during and war, and after the war where most of these chemicals were and most of these biological agents.

Breaking a cardinal rule of spy craft, I actually let it be known that I wanted to work for the CIA.

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

When I wrote my eighth thriller, ‘Inside Out,’ in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.

I love that Barry Seal is working for the CIA, and he’s an awful liar. It just goes to how honest this character is at the end of the day, even as he rips off the country and the world to the tune of becoming one of the wealthiest men in America. There’s an innate honesty, a purity to him.

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 covered the White House during the Bush years when Ari Fleischer, Scott McClellan and Dana Perino were at the podium. We thought those were, at times, crazy press briefings, asking questions about major events like the Iraq War and the leaking of Valerie Plame’s name and the outing of her as a CIA operative.

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.

Andrew Warren was a rarity in the CIA’s Clandestine Service – African-American, fluent in Arabic, and relatively young for an agent who’d already spent nearly a decade chasing terrorists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria, so deep undercover that few of his friends or family knew the nature of his work.

On 6 October 1973, the Yom Kippur war broke out between a coalition of Arab states and Israel. At 6 A.M. that morning, Kissinger, asleep in the Waldorf, was taken by surprise by the Arab attack – as were the CIA and the rest of the world.

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.

As I look back on my first year as Director, I am more in awe of the men and women at CIA than ever before.

My Life in CIA is the first time that I’ve ever written a story in my own name.

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn’t let them into the family brokerage business.

I have always been appalled by the depiction of female CIA operatives.

It’s hard for me to imagine that some people in the CIA who had firsthand knowledge would be unable to recognize that this would be helpful information for a soldier‘s death.

Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn’t feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.

Bob Gates is really emblematic of the modern CIA. He joins it in 1968, just a day before the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. And, of course, he rises very quickly. In less than six years, he’s on the National Security Council staff, at the closing weeks of Richard Nixon‘s presidency and then on into Gerald Ford.

I wouldn’t even know – and I spent three years in the CIA – I wouldn’t even know how you’d start a covert action program in a place like Iran. It would be extraordinarily difficult.

I’m a former CIA officer and Pentagon official. I’m a deep believer in border security, but we have to be a nation of moral – of morals and, like, a moral core.

In carrying out every aspect of our work, CIA officers are guided by a professional ethos that is the sum of our abiding principles, core values, and highest aspirations. These include service, integrity, excellence, courage, teamwork, and stewardship. Sacrifice, too, is an inescapable part of our mission.

I come from a service family – I met my husband Dave during my third tour in Iraq serving as a CIA analyst alongside the military.

Not much ever really comes of commissions, really. The last one that really came up with something truly concrete was the Warren Commission, and for all its good work, most Americans persist in believing that Oswald was working in tandem with the CIA, FBI, Lyndon Johnson, and the John Birch Society.

The men and women of the CIA are a national treasure.

I think even pro-China legislators would not believe I’m really a CIA agent.

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

If you walk into the front hallway of the CIA, you will see, on your left, a statue of William ‘Wild Bill‘ Donovan. Bill Donovan was the person who created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was America’s spy agency during World War II and then kind of morphed into what’s now the CIA.

Let’s remember, the CIA’s job is to go out and create wars.

Nothing is more important to those of us at CIA than our obligation to earn the trust of our fellow citizens.

The fact is, psychiatric help is not widely available to CIA agents – and as in the military, there is a stigma attached to admitting post-traumatic stress.

Since 9/11, the U.S.A. Patriot Act has torn down the invisible wall that was perceived as preventing the FBI and CIA from sharing information.

Many senior government officials, CIA, FBI, counter terrorism officials – when they look back at the decade, they effectively conclude that the United States overreacted after 9/11.

SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.

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.

Over my career, I’ve reinvented myself numerous times. I covered the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA. I wrote about labor wars, trade wars and real wars. I chronicled a nuclear plant meltdown and the defeat of Communism. I co-founded a couple of media businesses.

In much of the world, there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense.

People in the CIA, they marry each other. They’re like actors! We have to travel without much warning to far-flung places, and it’s very hard to communicate what our experiences are like to those in the outside world.

As director of CIA, I was responsible for everything done in the agency’s name, and it didn’t matter whether that was done by an agency employee, a government contractor, a liaison service on our behalf, or a source on our behalf.

As a beat reporter covering the CIA and intelligence world after the terrorist attacks of 2001, I could sense that many things I couldn’t see or understand were changing, expanding, getting so big they were difficult to manage.

George H.W. Bush had perhaps the greatest resume in American history. Director of the CIA, ambassador to the U.N., envoy to China, vice president of the United States and then, of course, president. It’s staggering to contemplate one person achieving so much.

The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.

I do believe that during the Bush-Cheney administration, that Vice President Cheney set a tone and an attitude for the CIA.

There is no worse place for an intelligence service like CIA to be than on Page 1, above the fold in your daily newspaper.

There is definitely a sense that when you, as a CIA ops officer… are handling assets, they are delivering to you their trust and their well-being. And you feel very protective of them, even if they’re not very nice people.

The CIA held about a hundred detainees from 2002 to 2008; about a third of them underwent interrogations that have been variously described as enhanced, tough or torture. The toughest technique was water boarding, used on three detainees, the last in early 2003.

When I handed over the names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union, I had come to the conclusion that the loss of these sources to the U.S. would not compromise significant national defense, political, diplomatic interests.

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.

President George H.W. Bush was a patriot who served our country in World War II, lead the CIA, an Ambassador to the United Nations, was the Vice President and the Commander and Chief who oversaw the end of the Cold War and successfully led our troops through the Gulf War.

Despite constant vilifying by the media and congressional threats to take away the tools needed to uncover plots, FBI agents and CIA officers work silently around the clock and risk their own lives to keep us safe.

I am not sorry the CIA went to the edge of the law in the aftermath of 9/11 to prevent further mass-casualty attacks on the U.S.

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979.

I think cleaning house at the CIA needed to happen.

My literal responsibility as director of the CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress – not to seek their approval; to inform.

Pakistan has accepted some security training from the CIA, but U.S. export restrictions and Pakistani suspicions have prevented the two countries from sharing the most sophisticated technology for safeguarding nuclear components.

I have spent my life working to protect our country. I served three tours in Iraq with the CIA, served in national security positions under Presidents of both parties, and at the Pentagon.

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.

I am always getting messages that I am paid by America, that I work for America, that I am connected with CIA… blah blah blah. I am not working for America, I am working for my country’s good, but America is not an enemy for me.

After 9/11, a few hundred CIA and Special Operations personnel, backed by airpower and Afghan militias, devastated Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. That effort has since turned into a conventional Pentagon nation-building exercise and gone backward.

It is illegal for the CIA to spy on Americans and an affront to our Republic to spy on the Senate.

I like to take people you wouldn’t really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It’s in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that.

I know CIA like the back of my hand.

Internal fights between various agencies, i.e. between the CIA and FBI, are highly counterproductive.

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

When I was a CIA officer we would have meetings and you don’t know what people’s politics are… We were there to serve a mission that we were focused on that mission.

I’ve always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts.

We knew that if the photos of CIA officers conducting authorized EIT (enhanced interrogation techniques) ever got out, the difference between a legal, authorized, necessary, and safe program and the mindless actions of some MPs (military police) would be buried by the impact of the images.

I learned later, just as a footnote, that the World Assembly of Youth was a CIA front.

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.

I got a top-secret security clearance and served in the CIA.

By the late ’70s I had come to question the point of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the CIA’s overall charter.

Simply stated, the need for accurate intelligence and prescient analysis from CIA has never been greater than it is in 2013 – or than it will be in the coming years.

My biggest, you know, regret is what happened in Benghazi. It was a terrible tragedy losing four Americans – two diplomats and, now it’s public so I can say, two CIA operatives.

I would not allow CIA to undertake activity that is immoral, even if it is technically legal.

I’ve tried, in ‘Bloodmoney,’ to tell a story that gets at the crazy relationship between the ISI and the CIA, these absolutely fascinating, often mutually destructive two scorpions in a bottle kind of relationship that they have.