James R. Clapper Quotes

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

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

My experience is that our intelligence officials try to do the right thing, but even with good intentions, sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes they can be overzealous.

My experience is the White House is not a very good place to coordinate intelligence, much less to integrate it.

I do have concerns about the current efforts to restructure our nation's intelligence community.

… policy has shaped intelligence more than vice versa.

Obama found a lot of people that think just like he does, and he put them in the intelligence community. Can you imagine? When you think of the intelligence community, don't you think of super patriots, don't you think of people out there even risking their lives to defend and protect the Constitution and the people of this country and this country itself as founded? No. That's not the kind of people Obama put at the CIA.

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.

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.

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.

I don't want to talk about intelligence matters. I will say, however, that intelligence-community estimates should not become public in the way of this city and in the way of Congress.

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.

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

Congress has really serious oversight powers over Intelligence Agencies that they have not exercised in recent years.

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.

People in charge of intelligence are political as well.

It is not the intelligence community's place to set and implement policy.

Woe to you who insults the intelligence community, if you're president.

I have great respect for the people in intelligence and CIA. I don't have a lot of respect for in particular one of the leaders. But that's OK. But I have a lot of respect for the people in the CIA.

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

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.

We sit for a week and listen to an extraordinary amount of people talk about what they do in the intelligence world. It's pretty overwhelming.

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.

You have multiple intelligence agencies. They all ultimately report to the director of national intelligence but, you know, it never comes in neat packages. So you have to make judgments on what you have, and it's not easy to do.