Top 394 CIA Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

The CIA will only hire people with impeccable credentials to be a translator. 'Impeccable credentials' means you've never lived outside the United States.

When I wrote my eighth thriller, Inside Out, in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.

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.

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 most cost-effective move we could make in defense spending would be to shift the focus of CIA operations, giving this agency the directive to make trouble for the Soviet Union.

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.

The disaster at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedy's doubts about listening to advisers from the CIA, the Pentagon, or the State Department who had misled him or allowed him to accept lousy advice.

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.

I had no concerns - I had no reason to have concerns based on what was available to me about North's contacts with the private sector people, but I didn't think a CIA person should do it.

I don't trust American intelligence. You look at the torture report from the Senate: People inside the CIA are saying that it doesn't work, and we're getting the information not from torture, but simply from questioning people.

The CIA could not face up to the American people and admit that its former employees had conspired to assassinate the President; so from the moment Kennedy's heart stopped beating, the Agency attempted to sweep the whole conspiracy under the rug.

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.

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.

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.

The CIA was revealed to be spying in France, not for military purposes, but for corporate purposes. So this $30 billion spook agency is now at the disposal of these oligarchic corporate structures run by the 1%.

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 problems of tribal conflicts in Kenya are much older, caused by the former colonial power. A former American ambassador there once wrote about how the CIA has contributed to the divisions between Kenyans.

In examining the CIA's past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public.

Our own CIA has a storied history of interfering in elections. In the late '40s, we shoveled cash into France and Italy after World War II to defeat the Communists who had been part of the wartime resistance to the Nazis and Fascists.

Death squads have been created and used by the CIA around the world - particularly the Third World - since the late 1940s, a fact ignored by the elite-owned media.

Neither Mueller, the Obama FBI, DOJ, CIA, State Department, nor the Deep State ever had a good-faith basis to pursue President Trump on Russia collusion.

Dude, I've played almost every position except for President. When I did 'The Event,' I was head of the CIA. When I did 'Chuck,' I was head of the NSA. For a guy that's a hippie at heart, I don't know where they think of this.

I never write about CIA conspiracies or the FBI or mafia or anything like that because I just dont understand that world. But I think I do understand individual human harmfulness.

Magic is used in espionage, all the time, for clandestine things. I've got a whole library from a gentleman who was hired by the CIA to create magic technology for the use of anti-terrorism.

As a former CIA case officer, I recognize that the rapid rise of firms like Huawei and ZTE presents a significant national security threat to the telecom infrastructure of the United States and our allies.

In much of the world, there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense.

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.

I have done very little in my life except go to school and work for the CIA. Intellectually I think I did everything I could. Emotionally you always think you should have something more.

Who better to help formulate and to lead debate on fighting ISIS and Islamic extremists than an Arabic-speaking former CIA case officer who has been fighting the war on terrorism?

What the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President and the NSC [National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President.

In recent years, anyone in the government, certainly anyone in the FBI or the CIA, or recently, in again, Clint's film, In the Line of Fire, the main bad guy is the chief advisor to the president.

We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.

So many times, genuine health workers and genuine NGO folks are really just trying to help other humans in whatever capacity they can. But they are perceived as being CIA, and therefore, it blocks their effectiveness.

When I was a CIA officer we would have meetings and you don't know what people's politics are... We were there to serve a mission that we were focused on that mission.

All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by CIA, KGB and the like), hydrodynamics (supported by manufacturers of atomic submarines) and celestial mechanics (financed by military and other institutions dealing with missiles, such as NASA).

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.

CIA officers aren't idiots. They knew they were heading into deep water - legally and morally - when they signed up for the interrogation program. That's part of the agency's ethos - doing the hard jobs that other departments prudently avoid.

Instead of using this space to pretend the newly released CIA 'torture' report confirms that the United States is the most evil nation in the history of the universe, I'm going to address Jonathan Gruber's confirmation that he believes we're all stupid.

Having the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.

We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That's what people forget.... They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reasonable people can disagree about the authorities the NSA should have, when it's appropriate for the CIA to use drone strikes, and how assertive U.S. foreign policy and intelligence should be.

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.

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.

A lot has changed since I first arrived at CIA, but our mission remains as relevant and important as ever. And this is what makes our officers excited to come to work each morning, including me.

The head of the CIA, it seems to me, would think long and hard before he admitted that former employees of his had been involved in the murder of the President of the United States-even if they weren't acting on behalf of the Agency when they did it.

I've tried, in 'Bloodmoney,' to tell a story that gets at the crazy relationship between the ISI and the CIA, these absolutely fascinating, often mutually destructive two scorpions in a bottle kind of relationship that they have.

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.

My mother is not a CIA agent, but she's an Italian mother, and she'd do anything for her son.

For a President not to have confidence in, not to be prepared to listen to the myriad of intelligence agencies from defense intelligence, to the CIA, etcetera, is absolutely mindless. It's just mindless.

When I wrote my eighth thriller, 'Inside Out,' in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.

Everybody thinks it's glamorous and this spy versus spy stuff is so exciting, but working in that industry and being a CIA operative, like a field officer, is tough. That's a difficult job that usually dismantles their lives in some capacity.

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.

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.

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.

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).

There's some new evidence that has just come out about the CIA planning terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the '60s and how they were going to set up Castro for it in order to get America behind a war in Cuba.