Top 100 CIA Quotes

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.

CIA will continue to pursue every lead; analyze the information we collect with critical, objective eyes; and brief reliable intelligence to protect U.S. forces deployed around the world.

The CIA’s always-useful World Fact book says that a staggering 6.3 million Colombians have been internally displaced (IDP) since 1985, with ‘about 300,000 new IDPs each year since 2000,’ the year Bill Clinton enacted Plan Colombia. Added up, that’s 2.4 million people during Clinton’s eight-year presidency.

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.

The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they’re actually going.

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

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.

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

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.

As a CIA officer, I worked counterterrorism and counternarcotics cases, and I have an acute awareness about the threats facing our country, both foreign and domestic.

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

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.’

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

I think soon after I became director of the CIA – President Obama pulled me into the Oval Office and said: ‘Look, I just want you to know that your top priority is to go after Osama bin Laden.’

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.

The CIA teamed up with Army, Air Force and Naval Intelligence to run one of the most nefarious, classified, enhanced interrogation programs of the Cold War. The work took place inside a clandestine facility in the American zone of occupied Germany, called Camp King.

I was in the CIA for nine years. I am intimately familiar with the information classification system. I used it every day on the job. Like every other one of my colleagues at the agency, I approached the handling of classified information with immense care because I understand the ramifications.

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.

Armed drones have become Barack Obama’s way to engage in terrorist-infested hellholes without putting ‘boots on the ground.’ For years, the CIA has been running a secrecy-shrouded program of targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and more recently in Somalia, Syria and Iraq.

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.

I didn’t appreciate how special and sometimes strange my CIA world was – until it suddenly and spectacularly ended in a newspaper column.

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.

I spent close to a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA and have spent most of my adult life collecting intelligence and protecting sources and methods.

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.

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.

Is it ‘left’ to insist that presidents and CIA directors adhere to the law? I don’t think so. I think it’s American.

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.

As a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, I know that the CIA, Treasury Department, National Security Agency, and others work closely to keep tabs on the IRGC’s operations.

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.

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.

As I detail in my new book: ‘Hard Measures, How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,’ there are many myths surrounding the detention of a relatively small number of top terrorists at CIA-run ‘black sites’ from 2002 until they were sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.

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

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.

I start every book with something that outrages me. I’m outraged by the FBI, the CIA, and computers that seem to have catalogued our lives. Power too often is accompanied by irresponsibility.

During my time as CIA Director and Secretary of Defense, Hillary was a strong supporter of our efforts to protect our homeland, decimate al-Qaeda, and bring Osama bin Laden to justice.

The activities that went on at Camp King between 1946 and the late 1950s have never been fully accounted for by either the Department of Defense or the CIA.

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

People have different relationships with power. I suppose a large portion of the ‘Homeland’ audience aligns with the U.S., sort of against the enemies. We certainly have the CIA viewpoint on the world – and it’s their job.

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.

In the CIA, they recruit you to be an officer, an ops officer, in part due to how well you cope with stress and how well you adapt to new situations.

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

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.

I suddenly realized at the CIA that I had to make life-and-death decisions about people.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’s research program is described in a book called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

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.

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.

Throughout my career, I had the great fortune to experience firsthand as well as to witness what it means to be a CIA officer.

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

As a journalist, I try to avoid talking to American diplomats, because I am stunned again and again by just how little grasp they have of what people are really feeling in a country. Especially CIA guys. Maybe they’re just really good at playing stupid, but I don’t think so.

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.

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.

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.

If I was a CIA front company, what would I want to be able to do? Well, I would want to be able to land at military airfields as a civilian, so there’s got to be some document that the Air Force or the Army has that would list all the civilian aircraft that are cleared to land at military bases.

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.

For me, as for our entire Agency family, the 129 stars on CIA’s Memorial Wall are more than just symbols. They are solemn reminders of friends and colleagues who answered their nation’s call, and who willingly risked their lives to protect us all.

Before he played CIA Director Saul Berenson on ‘Homeland,’ a much younger Mandy Patinkin gained some fame as Inigo Montoya, a legendary swordsman, in ‘The Princess Bride.’

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.

The CIA has acknowledged that it has detained about 100 terrorists since 9/11, and about a third of them have been subjected to what the CIA refers to as ‘enhanced interrogation tactics,’ and only a small proportion of those have in fact been subjected to the most serious types of enhanced procedures.

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.

The office has oversight of people who do analysis and oversight of people who do operations, but it is not charged with doing either. That is an important point to make. Those functions are performed by the CIA, DIA and other agencies.

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

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.

Scouting is like CIA work and investigative work. You create a lot of stuff and try a lot of stuff. Some works and some doesn’t. I try to get creative.

My experience has been that military assessments on ‘how goes the war’ are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies.

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

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.

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.

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.

As an old man who remembers the intellectual exhilaration and the pleasure of having done good work that characterized the CIA when it was young, I wonder if it might not be better to speak and think in terms of restoring its culture.

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

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 you’re in the CIA, you anticipate the possibility that you’ll be betrayed by a foreign government or a source, but you never anticipate that it would be by your own government.

The reason I wrote ‘Hit List’ is the 50 mysterious deaths of witnesses to the JFK assassination. We’re talking about CIA agents, FBI agents, reporters, people who had foreknowledge, or people who spoke too much afterward.

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.

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.

CIA relies on a partner’s focus, linguistic agility, and cultural depth; in return, the partner benefits from CIA’s resources, technology, and global view.

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.

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.

The American people and our allies around the world can rely on CIA’s vigilance, excellence, and determination to proudly serve.

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.

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

As the plot of ‘Condor’ unfolds, you’ll understand that nothing is sacred in the pharmacy world or in the behind-the-scenes workings of the CIA and FBI.

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.

It’s very important to me that people who are actual chefs and other professionals in the culinary world, understand that I’m not, and have never held myself out as being, like a CIA trained chef.

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.

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.

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.

Betty Shabazz was the wife of a man who challenged a government that was historically unjust. She was harassed and placed under surveillance by the Nation of Islam (NOI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

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.

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.

The last book I read to my mom was ‘Barbara Bush: A Memoir’ published by mom in 1994. It reflected on their entire life – dad going to China, running the CIA, running for Senate, running for President twice.

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.