A Quote by Ronald Kessler
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.
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What's less well known is that the CIA's executive management staff is far more concerned with selecting the right candidates to serve as CIA officers than it is about selecting agents overseas. The CIA dedicates a huge portion of its budget figuring how to select, control, and manage its own work force. It begins with instilling blind obedience. Most CIA officers consider themselves to be soldiers. The CIA is set up as a military organization with a sacred chain of command that cannot be violated. Somebody tells you what to do, and you salute and do it. Or you're out.
The men and women of the FBI are deployed around the clock, all over our country and around the world, identifying and disrupting threats, and pursuing those who would do us harm.
We need spies that look like their targets, CIA officers who speak the dialects terrorists use, and FBI agents who can speak to Muslim women who might be intimidated by men.
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.
I heard some good news today, the FBI and the CIA are going to start cooperating. They are going to start working together. And if you don't know the difference between the FBI and the CIA, the FBI bungles domestic crime, the CIA bungles foreign crime.
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.
Every time I attend an FBI graduation for new agents or new analysts at Quantico, a significant number of those graduates are former state and local officers, and I have the privilege of shaking their hands, presenting them with their credentials, and welcoming them to the FBI family.
The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI's investigation, so there's anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. We've published about 33,000 of Clinton's emails when she was Secretary of State.
The same tools we need to use to keep this country safe by bringing terrorists to justice, because I guarantee you, if they have the opportunity and the means, they will take American lives.
You can say that I lived in Asia for a long time and in Japan I became close to several CIA agents. And you could say that I became an adviser to several CIA agents in the field and, through my friends in the CIA, met many powerful people and did special works and special favors.
In the 1960s, after the Cuban Revolution, CIA and FBI agents often coordinated their activities with anti-Castro Cuban exiles.
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.
One of the hardest things I do as FBI Director is call the chiefs and sheriffs in departments around the nation when officers have been killed in the line of duty. I call to express my sorrow and offer the FBI's help.
Our struggle to put first things first can be characterized by the contrast between two powerful tools that direct us: the clock and the compass. The clock represents our commitments, appointments, schedules, goals, activities - what we do with, and how we manage our time. The compass represents our vision, values, principles, mission, conscience, direction - what we feel is important and how we lead our lives. In an effort to close the gap between the clock and the compass in our lives, many of us turn to the field of "time management."
Everything the CIA does is deniable. It's part of its Congressional mandate. Congress doesn't want to be held accountable for the criminal things the CIA does. The only time something the CIA does become public knowledge - other than the rare accident or whistleblower - is when Congress or the President think it's helpful for psychological warfare reasons to let the American people know the CIA is doing it.
We spend our lives on the run: we get up by the clock, eat and sleep by the clock, get up again, go to work - and then we retire. And what do they give us? A bloody clock.
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