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.
