Charles G. Boyd Quotes

The manner in which intelligence indicators were handled in the Cuba situation may well be the most serious flaw in our intelligence system, and one which, if uncorrected, could lead to the gravest consequences

There should be a mass purge of the CIA for incompetence…. There were 3,000 people killed on September 11, and not a single CIA operative has been fired. They missed that; they missed the weapons of mass destruction.

Intelligence is a sacred cow. We’ve done nothing since we’ve been here about it. The CIA isn’t worth a damn.

Richard M. Helms, the first director of Central Intelligence to rise from the ranks, was fond of saying that the CIA had been founded to make sure that there would never be another Pearl Harbor. Underlying this mission impossible was the wishful supposition that an America that knew everything could prevent anything.

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

The skills of the British intelligence community are a great national asset.

If you look back today over the last 25 years, it is a fact that we have had a progressive degeneration of our intelligence community in general; in particular in the field of human intelligence.

I was an intelligence officer, not a policy-maker.

While the intelligence profession oftentimes demands secrecy, it is critically important that there be a full and open discourse on intelligence matters with the appropriate elected representatives of the American people.

Any foreign policy that is formulated in secret intelligence will always get the nation in trouble… secret intelligence always gets it wrong. It is a sample of a small part of the world---a picture of the world that is dramatically skewed.

There is still much to be done by our intelligence community to bring its achievements up to an acceptable level.

The CIA should best serve the U.S. by being an unbiased reporter of the truth and if it were a fighting organization, that would affect its ability to analyze and report intelligence.

Intelligence, like any other aspect of national security, has to be under civilian control.

Abolish the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Directors of Central Intelligence are supposed to steer clear of policy.

We were bereft of any human intelligence—zero, nada, in terms of agents on the ground…. We had no answers.

In the 1990s, human intelligence gathering was seriously neglected.

The Committee's review of a series of intelligence shortcomings, to include intelligence prior to 9/11 and the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, clearly reveal how vital a diverse intelligence workforce is to our national security.

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.

The men and women of the CIA are a national treasure.

Our intelligence community needs better coordination of operations and exchange of information, and that's why we need an overall director of national intelligence and a national counterterrorism center.

When I was younger, I actually wanted to be a CIA agent. Really. I even did the online questionnaire.

George Tenet has been the director of central intelligence since 1997, time enough to have changed the Agency's culture. He has failed. He should go.

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.'