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.