Cia Quotes & Sayings
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Top Cia Quotes

...More to the point, do their representatives and senators in Washington deliberately prioritize the stated requirement of the Pentagon and CIA above the most basic need of their constituents? Yes, if those legislators have developed the unfortunate tendency to go into a trance every time someone utter the magic phrase "national security." In truth, it happen often enough, and many times of the course of my career I saw Congress respond to that occult incantation like iron filing drawn to a magnet. p 64 — Mike Lofgren

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. — Christopher Shays

It's much different today than it was during the Cold War. The CIA is not the subject of many books anymore. But that might change, because of international terrorism and Red China. — Nelson DeMille

In a June 25, 2010, Washington Post article, the CIA acknowledged officially
discussing the creation of a video of a fake Saddam Hussein having sex with a
teenage boy in order to discredit him in the eyes of the Iraqi people. Evidently,
the Agency did create a video of a fake Osama Bin Laden drinking liquor
around a campfire with his cronies, bragging about their conquests of young
boys. The article quoted an anonymous former CIA officer "chuckling" at the
memory, and declaring that the actors used in the video were drawn from
"some of us darker-skinned employees." These ridiculous clandestine ideas
brought to mind the childish efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro forty years
earlier. — Donald Jeffries

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. — Roger Morris

New Rule: Conspiracy theorists who are claiming that we didn't really kill Bin Laden must be reminded that they didn't think he did the crime in the first place. Come on, nutjobs, keep your bullshit straight: The towers were brought down in a controlled demolition by George W. Bush to distract attention from Hawaii, where CIA operatives were planting phony birth records so that a Kenyan named Barack Obama could someday rise to power and pretend to take out the guy we pretended took out the Towers. And I know that's true because I just got it in an e-mail from Trump. — Bill Maher

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

In the case of Pakistan, the CIA actually used a fake vaccination campaign to try to locate Osama bin Laden, so now vaccination is associated with espionage. — Eula Biss

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. — Christopher Buckley

White House political adviser Karl Rove was one of Robert Novak's sources for the 2003 disclosure of a CIA operative's identity, according to a story published today in "Duh" magazine. — Andy Borowitz

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. — Ronald Kessler

The CIA has a plot ... they've used before to get rid of world leaders. Only problem ... is convincing Hussein ... to fly to Dallas. — Bill Hicks

Andrew Warren was a rarity in the CIA's Clandestine Service - African-American, fluent in Arabic, and relatively young for an agent who'd already spent nearly a decade chasing terrorists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria, so deep undercover that few of his friends or family knew the nature of his work. — Michael Hastings

I'm with the federal government, Drummond, Trust me is another way of saying I'm lying. — Brian Haig

Until all the files are released, former officials and CIA personnel will continue to say or imply that Fidel killed JFK, thus perpetuating the fifty-plus-year Cold War with Cuba — Lamar Waldron

Gentlemen. You are looking at the true Abraham Lincoln of Arabia. And in order to end our internal bickering - our civil war, if you will - I have solicited your aid. — Leonard Leventon

Senior administrators within the CIA participated in plausible denial and other disinformation and cover-up strategies concerning CIA operations run on U.S. soil. Like — Colin A. Ross

Chief, Medical Staff, Technical Services Division, CIA responded, I imagine the only reason would have been concern for broadening awareness of its existence. — Colin A. Ross

Barack Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, had quite an interesting life, shot through with coincidences. Stanley Ann was some mom
and by 'some mom,' it's meant that she was a globetrotting, oil-rep-marrying, CIA-front-employed, twelve-language-speaking, International Mom of Mystery. — Mondo Frazier

I find a difference in British spy fiction and American spy fiction. In the American version, it's more militaristic, partly because the CIA has more of the military makeup. Whereas MI6 is more of a cerebral, intelligence-based, relationship-based service, i.e., all they do is recruit people to get information out of them. — Charles Cumming

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. — Hillary Clinton

After the 11 September attack," March editorializes one morning, "amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame 'the CIA' or 'a secret rogue operation.' But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line
who knows, maybe even the CIA's scared of them. — Thomas Pynchon

They forget that the CIA is all about collecting information. Information for other people to act on. If you join the CIA expecting a life of laser guns, ju-jitsu and exotic STDs, bear in mind that your only contact with them may come through the pages of The Lancet and Popular Mechanics. — Jay Spencer Green

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. — Jose Rodriguez

manage the community outside of the CIA. An official observed, "The CIA director managed the CIA; it was the best job in the world. Managing the IC meant going out to the NRO and sitting through a three-hour meeting about satellite specifications. So it just was not done well."3 — Michael Allen

From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.' — Barry Eisler

John F. Kennedy, who seized the White House from Richard Nixon in a frenzied campaign that turned a whole generation of young Americans into political junkies, got shot in the head for his efforts, murdered in Dallas by some hapless geek named Oswald who worked for either Castro, the mob, Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, his dominatrix landlady or the odious, degenerate FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The list is long and crazy - maybe Marilyn Monroe's first husband fired those shots from the grassy knoll. Who knows? — Hunter S. Thompson

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. — Yoweri Museveni

If the CIA is going to disrupt future terrorist attacks, it needs to recruit spies to infiltrate those groups in order to disrupt the terrorist attacks. Not to rely on what you and I are putting in chat messages on Google or Apple. — John Kiriakou

It appears that legal positions that you have supported have been used by the administration, the military, and the CIA to justify torture and Geneva Convention violations by military and civilian personnel. — Edward Kennedy

According to old frineds who grew up with Stanley Ann Dunham, she became a serious student of Communist and Marxist theories back in high school. One profile even named a few of her radical teachers and administrators at Mercer High, which Dunham attended, whose classrooms formed part of what was called "anarchy alley." What sounds strange is that this avante-garde, supposedly idealistic communist-thinking student of the left met a major oil company executive during the radical 1960s, and not only found him not to be a repulsively evil money-grubbing capitalist pig, but was so taken in by his Big Oil company/military charm that she married him.
Okay, so maybe that's not coincidence. Maybe that's just the power of love. — Mondo Frazier

FMSF Advisory Board Members Dr Martin Orne and Dr Louis Jolyon West are CIA and military mind control contractors with TOP SECRET CIA clearance. Both received MKULTRA contracts to study dissociative disorders, implantation of false memories, and techniques for creation of Manchurian Candidates. The dissociative disorders, false memories, and the therapist-created multiple personality are the focus of the FMSF campaign. — Colin A. Ross

For the world as a whole, the CIA has now become the bogey that Communism has been for America. Wherever there is trouble, violence, suffering, tragedy, the rest of us are now quick to suspect the CIA had a hand in it. Our phobia about the CIA is, no doubt, as fantastically excessive as America's phobia about world Communism; but in this case, too, there is just enough convincing guidance to make the phobia genuine. In fact, the roles of America and Russia have been reversed in the world's eyes. Today America has become the world's nightmare. When an uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable team can flaunt the historic and traditional codes of civilization by disregarding the honor and sovereignty of other countries large and small, by intervening in the internal affairs of other countries for reasons real and contrived, the rest of the world does fear for its own welfare and for the future of this country. — L. Fletcher Prouty

Rather than inserting more Marines and engineers to harden and defend the American Embassy - thus sending an unequivocal message that such an assault against American sovereign territory in the heart of Tehran would never be tolerated again - the bureaucrats back at the White House and State Department had panicked. They'd reduced the embassy's staff from nearly a thousand to barely sixty. The Pentagon had shown a similar lack of resolve. The number of U.S. military forces in-country had been drawn down from about ten thousand active-duty troops to almost none. The only reason Charlie had been sent in - especially as green as he was - was because he happened to be one of the few men in the entire U.S. diplomatic corps who was actually fluent in Farsi. None of the three CIA guys on site even spoke the language. — Joel C. Rosenberg

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. — Annie Jacobsen

The CIA's offices in London were no secret to the MI6. In fact, the two agencies were practically kissing cousins. — Kenneth Eade

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.' — Leon Panetta

The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about. — Tucker Carlson

Twenty years ago, two of the CIA's best double-agents had been murdered in their own home on Christmas Eve. The husband had been killed first, and the wife had been raped repeatedly before she'd been beaten to death. The two children were never found. — Katie Reus

Famously, the CIA is somewhere where marriages hardly ever last because it's obviously such a strange lifestyle. — Chris Terrio

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. — Michael Hayden

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. — Vince Flynn

I wouldn't doubt it if the CIA is behind Alcoholics Anonymous. — Scott Stapp

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. — Stephen Cambone

When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear an oath - not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an oath to the Constitution. So there's this friction, this emerging contest between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you're asked to participate in. — Jeremy Scahill

The Americans said they had no choice but to do it like that because no one really knew which side the ISI was on and someone might have tipped off bin Laden before they reached him. The director of the CIA said Pakistan was "either involved or incompetent. — Malala Yousafzai

FBI vs. CIA
When a person works for the FBI for 20 years and retires,
he gets a watch.
When a person works for the CIA for 20 years and retires,
he gets watched.
I know this not because I'm in law enforcement or with the NSA ~
I know this because I have HBO. — Beryl Dov

I suddenly realized at the CIA that I had to make life-and-death decisions about people. — Leon Panetta

Team within the United States, such operations had to be kept secret because the CIA was prohibited by its Charter from carrying out operations in the United States. — Colin A. Ross

What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. — Neil Postman

We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the US public believes is false. — William J. Casey

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. — Aaron McGruder

My Life in CIA is the first time that I've ever written a story in my own name. — Harry Mathews

The Bedouin was troubled by a familiar bundle of Middle Eastern bogeys: America in general and the CIA in particular; Jews, or if not Jews, then Christians; women's sexuality - both the fear of a "past" and the dread of present emancipation signaled by the absence of a veil. — Geraldine Brooks

We all know Damian's big on secrecy. The man makes the CIA look like a gabfest. He is Mr Need-To-Know.
As in, students never need to know. — Tera Lynn Childs

The CIA's research program is described in a book called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. — Ken Follett

Multilate. Ha Ha Ha,' said Nusswan, avuncular and willing to pretend it was a clever joke. 'Its all relative. At the best of times, democracy is a see saw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion. You see, to make a democratic omelette you have to break a few democratic eggs. To fight fascism and other evil forces threatening our country, there is nothing wrong in taking strong measures. Especially when the foreign hand is always interfering to destabilize us. Did you know the CIA is trying to sabotage the Family Planning Programme? — Rohinton Mistry

One of the questions I have been asked many times since this story broke is this: Now that the facts are out there, what can we do? My answer, depressing and cynical as it may be, is always the same. Not much. Not now. And certainly not until the American public and its Congressional representatives regain control of the CIA and shred the curtain of secrecy that keeps us from discovering these crimes of state until its too late.
Perhaps when the government officials who presided over these outrages are safely in their crypts, and their apologists and cheerleaders are buried woth them, future historians can finally call these men to account for the miseries they caused. Even if that's all that ever happens, it will be fitting and just, because the favorable judgment of history is ultimately what they craved. — Gary Webb

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. — Tyler Drumheller

My CIA godfather told me he'd never heard any American speak Japanese so well. — Steven Seagal

What? No heartbeat? Huh. Funny. Moving on, the bigger problem is why do I have circles under my eyes?' "And he'd say, 'Wait a second. Did you hear me? No heart!' And we'd be all 'Yes, yes, we heard you. But other than missing a major organ, what's wrong with me?' And then he'd go on and on about the whole no-heart thing, and then I would try to distract him by doing that dance I do - you know, the one that looks like the running man. . . . But before I finish my entire routine, the doctor would be texting the CIA to tell them about my lack of heart, and the rounds of involuntary government testing would begin. — Brodi Ashton

I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified. — Porter Goss

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. — Robert Harris

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. — Philip Agee

Hillary Clinton lived at Wellesley and Yale. Her circle of friends was that Ivy League bunch, and they were all being trained for lives in government. They were all being trained for lives of government: CIA, State Department. — Rush Limbaugh

Good journalism is being criminalized or otherwise rendered perilous to its best practitioners. Attack a government agency like the CIA, or a Fortune 500 member ... , or the conduct of the military in Southeast Asia and you find yourself in deep trouble, naked and often alone. — Daniel Schorr

By 1986 the CIA was spending 70 per cent of its entire operations budget funding a Muslim jihad to kill Russians. The whole campaign was managed by a bunch of Islamists who were giving the lion's share of the US money and weapons to people who wanted to kill Americans. The US was happy to use Islam as a rallying cry. The CIA funded the printing of Korans to be distributed throughout the region, and the University of Nebraska produced primary-school textbooks, known as 'the ABC of Jihad', which taught children the alphabet and to count with Kalashnikovs and swords instead of apples and oranges, and were filled with images of Islamic warriors. Alphabet — Christina Lamb

It was the United States, after all, which poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp — Seumas Milne

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. — Leon Panetta

This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the East Asian studies department of a university, people usually analyze North Korea from afar. They don't stop to think that in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love. — Barbara Demick

The Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican and Salvadorian cooks I've worked with over the years make most CIA-educated white boys look like clumsy, sniveling little punks. In — Anthony Bourdain

The CIA currently has in custody two FBI agents and a Boston police detective who is demanding they pay for the damage to his boat."
"He's okay?"
Burns nodded. "Emptied a double-barreled shotgun at a couple of Company lackeys, and then they arrested him. He spent all night claiming he thought they were the Men in Black coming to scan his brain"
Ty bit his lip so he wouldn't laugh.
about Nick — Abigail Roux

The bottom line is that the CIA knew before the war, during and war, and after the war where most of these chemicals were and most of these biological agents. — Christopher Shays

Is it 'left' to insist that presidents and CIA directors adhere to the law? I don't think so. I think it's American. — Anthony Lewis

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. — Noam Chomsky

The CIA has transformed from an organization created to recruit spies to steal secrets, into a paramilitary organization, a paramilitary force. It's not supposed to be a paramilitary force. It's not good at it. It needs to return to its roots. — John Kiriakou

40 million Russians are convinced that I am a scoundrel, a thief, a criminal or a CIA agent, who deserves to be shot, hanged or drawn and quartered. — Anatoly Chubais

Big D. November '63. He was there that Big Weekend. He caught the Big Moment and took this Big Ride.
He was a sergeant on Vegas PD. He was married. He had a chemistry degree. His father was a big Mormon fat cat. Wayne Senior was jungled up all over the nut Right. He did Klan ops for Mr. Hoover and Dwight Holly. He pushed high-line hate tracts. He rode the far-Right zeitgeist and stayed in the know. He knew about the JFK hit. It was multi-faction: Cuban exiles, rogue CIA, mob. Senior bought Junior a ticket to ride.
Extradition job with one caveat: kill the extraditee. — James Ellroy

I had never really given any thought to working for the CIA, but graduation was upon me; I was getting married just a week or two after graduation; I had no job, no prospects for a job. And so I said sure, I'd be interested in working for the CIA. — John Kiriakou

An interesting fact is that the town of Bau-Bau in Sulawesi, Indonesia, selected Hangeul in 2009 to write the Cia-Cia language.2 Who knows, maybe Hangeul will become one of the universal phonetic languages in the world! — Adrian Perrig

It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it's nearly everybody. — Lynne Truss

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. — Robert Baer

The CIA officer at the black site relayed the report to his headquarters. The CIA's director, George Tenet, was unhappy to learn that the FBI was leading the questioning. He ordered a CIA counterterrorism team to take over in Thailand. "We were removed," Soufan said. "Harsh techniques were introduced" - at first, stripping the prisoner of his clothes and depriving him of sleep for forty-eight hours at a time - and "Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking." Then the FBI took over again. — Tim Weiner

Saddam Hussein was a CIA operative whom the American spy agency deployed in 1959 to kill the ruler of Iraq, Abdul Karim Kassem. When that assassination attempt failed, Saddam entered a CIA protection program in Egypt until his Baath Party, also supported by the CIA, seized power in 1963. At least 5,000 Iraqis, most of them student activists, were executed immediately by the Baathist regime. And so our Iraq War began. — Anonymous

For years, President Obama and his top officials vehemently denounced China for using its surveillance capabilities for economic advantage while insisting that the United States and its allies never do any such thing. The Washington Post quoted an NSA spokesperson saying that the Department of Defense, of which the agency is a part, " 'does engage' in computer network exploitation," but "does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including 'cyber' " [emphatic asterisks in the original]. That the NSA spies for precisely the economic motive it has denied is proven by its own documents. The agency acts for the benefit of what it calls its "customers," a list that includes not only the White House, the State Department, and the CIA, but also primarily economic agencies, such as the US Trade Representative and the Departments of Agriculture, Treasury, and Commerce: — Glenn Greenwald

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. — Stanley Crouch

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. — Robert Dallek

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. — John P. Wheeler III

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. — Claire Danes

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. — Charles McCarry

It's clear the CIA was trying to play 'keep away' with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that's a serious constitutional concern. But it's equally if not more concerning that we're seeing another 'Merkel Effect,' where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it's a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them. — Edward Snowden

As the CIA and KGB, like God and Satan, fight Miltonic battles across five continents ... — Paul Johnson

Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II — William Blum

I've pretty much decided you're a CIA agent. — Anna Durand

Weiner, T.: Legacy of Ashes (The history of CIA). — Anonymous

I think the country could be spared a lot of agony and the government could worry about inflation and a lot of other problems if [Nixon would] go on and resign. [There is] no question that an admission of making false statements to government officials and interfering with the FBI and the CIA is an impeachable offense. — William J. Clinton

Caballero said the CIA's psychological torture methods often degenerated into physical torture, citing a young woman who was stripped, starved, deprived of sleep, beaten, burned, electrically shocked and sexually molested. — Anonymous

Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases. — Dennis Altman

Anybody see you come in here?"
Holly thought about it.
"The FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, M16. Oh, and the EIB."
Foaly frowned. "EIB?"
"Everyone in the building. — Eoin Colfer

How did the American people ever reach this point where they believe that US aggression in the Middle East will make us safe when it does the opposite? How did the American people ever reach the point where they believe that fighting unconstitutional wars is required to protect our freedoms and our Constitution? Why do we allow the NSA, CIA, FBI, TSA, etc. to destroy our liberty at home, as part of the Global War on Terror, with a pretext that they are preserving our liberty? Why are the lying politicians reelected and allowed to bankrupt our country, destroy our money, and enter wars without the proper consent? Why do the American people suffer in silence and not scream "Enough is enough!"? We've had enough of the "humanitarian do-gooders" and the proponents of "American exceptionalism" who give us nothing but war, economic suffering, and less freedom. This can and must be stopped. — Ron Paul