Ronen Bergman Quotes

Spying is a like a game of chess: Sometimes you have to withdraw, sometimes you have to sacrifice one of your pieces to win - preferably a knight rather than a king or queen.

[CIA] Case officers most fear the US ambassador and his staff, then restrictive headquarters cables, then curious gossipy neighbors in the local community, as potential threats to the operation. Next would come the local police, then the press. Last of all is the KGB.

I've long maintained during my 50-plus year career in intelligence that leaks endanger national security, they compromise sources, methods, and tradecraft, and they can put assets' lives at risk.

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.

Well look, CIA is an agency that has to collect intelligence, do operations. We have to take risks and it's important that we take risks and that we know that we have the support of the government and we have the support of the American people in what we're doing.

I think all governments engage in intelligence gathering vis-a-vis other governments.

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

For some, the very act of intelligence gathering seems illegitimate when applied to the crime of terrorism.

I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.

One of my own guiding principles in intelligence work was ... not to make a mystery of what is a matter of common knowledge or obvious to friend and foe alike.

Secrecy is as essential to Intelligence as vestments to a Mass, or darkness to a spiritualist seance, and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.

Intelligence without counter-intelligence is useless.

It [the CIA] was not intended as a Cloak & Dagger Outfit. It was intended merely as a center for keeping the President of what was going on in the World…I never wanted the CIA to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized.

Secrecy now beclouds everything about the Central Intelligence Agency—its cost, its efficiency, its success, its failures.

Nobody [at the CIA] had any idea of who was doing what where

If this was a graduating class of CIA case officers my advice would be short and to the point: Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counteraccusations.

The intelligence community is built, resourced, designed, trained, and focused around secrecy. We try to obtain the secrets of our adversaries and we try and keep secret how we are doing so.

Bureau of Secret Intelligence.

The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.

A chief of station is the head of all intelligence operations in any given country.

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.

The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going.

The aim of a foreign intelligence service is to find and convince individuals to help them achieve intelligence objectives.

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.

I spent over ten years in the Central Intelligence Agency as an undercover operations officer serving overseas after 9/11 where I carried out covert operations against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, as well as other countries who are 'hostile to liberty,' as I like to say.