A Quote by Robert M. Gates

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.'
The CIA is absolutely out of control. The CIA has been on a killing spree... The CIA has become a death squad and to see these films [ like Zero Dark Thirty] get so much acclaim at the time when the CIA is in its rogue killing phase is very disturbing.
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'm a career diplomat. I spent 30 years as a diplomat, out of which seven years as foreign minister. I've always believed in the United Nations as a centre of multilateralism and multilateral diplomacy.
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.
I'm acting for the same reasons I wanted to become a diplomat. I've thought about it a lot and concluded that I wanted to become a diplomat because it was a way to explore human nature. For the same reason that at one point in college, I wanted to be a sociologist.
When I was about, I'd say, 18 or 19 years old, I wanted to be a part of the CIA just because they know those intimate secrets... So I was just always into knowing. I like to know things.
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.
There's been a coup, have you heard? It's the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything, they run the military. They're the ones who are over there lobbing missiles and bombs on countries. ... And of course the CIA is every bit as secretive as the Federal Reserve. ... And yet think of the harm they have done since they were established [after] World War II. They are a government unto themselves. They're in businesses, in drug businesses, they take out dictators ... We need to take out the CIA.
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.
One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.
I was going to study at the Sorbonne and become a diplomat. Being a diplomat comes in handy when you are dealing with record companies.
We know that, immediately after 9/11, the CIA set up a program to collaborate with 80 foreign countries to varying degrees. The CIA also started funding other intelligence services in order to use them as proxies. We also know that some of these collaborations were kept off the record; supposedly, there is no paper trail.
People went out there and they wrote articles and went on television shows saying that I am an operative that the CIA who used Jon Stewart to recruit me. So Jon Stewart, who actually - a guy from America was used by the CIA in order to recruit me for the CIA and be - make me a CIA agent to use sarcasm to bring down the government and bring down the country because this was all, of course, part of a worldwide conspiracy against the country.
I was never the diplomatic diplomat.
My dad is an ambassador. My brother is a diplomat. I doubt that I could be doing anything else other than being a diplomat if I weren't in showbiz. It's in the genes!
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.
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